Spam Filter – The Basics of Spam Filters

Depending on which side of the coin you are looking at a spam filter can be considered a godsend or a nightmare. In the bulk email marketing world there started out being very little way to tell the difference between a legitimate marketer and the spammer as both sides of the business send mass emails out indiscriminately to absolutely any email address they could find.

These indiscriminate practices are what finally brought about a distinct separation between the two businesses. However, even though they have been split for a long time the stigma of being in the email business still remains.

The Need for a Cure

Spam emails are the bane of the email world, they are responsible for jamming more email boxes so full that they have no room for legitimate emails and frustrating owners as they have no idea how to deal with these massive explosions of email, none of which they signed up or asked for. Not only does spam email fill up your mailbox, but often it contains viruses and malware that can wreak havoc on your computer and spread to everyone in your address book.

The best way to take care of the problem is to apply the only cure there is, the spam filter. Think of a spam filter as working in the same way as you when you scan through your call log at work. You pick out the calls you recognize and discard the rest. The spam filter passes the email addresses that it recognizes and sends the rest to the junk or spam email box for you to review and discard at a later date.

How they Work

The modern spam filter works by using complex mathematical formulae such as the Markovian discrimination or the Bayesian method to scan the emails. Both programs scan the incoming emails for a particular set of keywords that automatically mark the email as spam. These scans take less time to read the entire email than it takes you to read the title. The scan allows the program to assign it a score based on preset values and using this score it either passes the email into your email box or sends it into the junk box.

The biggest difference between the two methods is that the Bayesian method scans for single words, whereas the Markovian one scans for whole phrases. Thanks to these two programs the amount of spam on the Internet has been drastically reduced in recent years. They have become good enough that most people will never see a spam email unless they actually go to their spam or junk email folder.

For those who are genuine markets getting past the spam filters has become an art form. Emails need to be made to look as much as possible like a regular email with no shouting, no bright colors and avoiding terms like "Dear" in the text or title. If you want to make sure that the clients on your list get your emails and newsletters you should use a confirmation email that will allow your customer to approve your email address so that it all future mailings will make it past the spam filters.