What Are Spam Filters?

By Author: Jene Pedder
Total Articles: 174
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Spam Filters are there to help you block unwanted and unsolicited emails that come through to your inbox. Spam has a variety of names from spam mail, to bulk email to junk mail. Due to such a high amount of spam being sent these days they say every other email you receive is spam shocking I know so having a spam filter will help reduce this, it won't get rid of every spam email you receive but it will help enormously in reducing the amount of spam email you receive in your inbox. Having a spam filter installed on your computer is now one of the barest necessities you need to help protect and reduce the amount of junk emails you receive.

You might be thinking well how does the spam filter know what emails are spam or junk and when they are actually legitimate emails.
Well the spam filter analyses the content of each email and looks for specific keywords for example: free or guaranteed and then tries to interpret their meanings within the sentences. This may of course cause some problems as you may have legitimate emails that have these keywords in but they have been treated as spam email and that person won't be able to send you emails again as their address will be blocked. If an email you receive comes in the form of Undisclosed Recipients then the email will be filtered through as junk, if the email comes through with your email address in the To or Cc fields you will receive the email with no problems.

To prevent these problems occurring you could use an add-on spam filter which allows you to control what emails should and should not come into your inbox. Once you have gone through this process which may take a bit of time in the long run, you controlling your inbox and spam box you will save a lot of time and energy.

Installing a spam filter is very easy; it can be installed on any computer system and help filter appropriate emails to your inbox and filter out junk emails. If you've decided to control the spam filter yourself you will need to set the parameters of what emails should be marked as spam and deleted. If you don't trust the filter to just delete spam email you have the option to look at all the junk email filtered and decide yourself if you want it all deleted, this will take time but it may be helpful just to make sure no legitimate email is being deleted.

There are a wide variety of spam filters on the market for your home computer as well as a business computer. There are a new range of filters called smarter filters these are recommended for technical experts as setting the filter up is a complex procedure. The smarter filter fights and prevents spam very effectively due to they look into statistical data rather than the features of the spam. The filter analyses the whole email and compares it to other spam emails already identified. The success rate of these filters is 99% which is fantastic.