This is not a happy ever after story, where the good guys always win. Ever since people have been using the internet, marketers and scammers have been using the same email technology to spread their agendas, and it seems the internet community have always been behind them in effectively stopping spam emails.
Spamming is not just reserved for emails. When I website repeatedly sends you messages in one form of another including your screen it is considered spamming. However, email spamming is the most prevalent and popular form of spamming.
Email spamming using your email address to send you unsolicited email, usually the the objective of to get you to buy something, or for you to click and download and install software.
Spamming is very popular with advertisers because it enables them to reach a very large world wide audience very quickly and almost virtually for free.
What Are Spam Filters
Spam filters are specially designed software, made with the intent to stop spam emails. Spam filters are constantly at war with he enemy and it is always hit and miss. Some spam filters might be good at detecting emails which have viruses, others are good against advertising, but rarely do they work great, as no matter what spam filter you use, there will always be something that sneaks in.
There are many different types of spamming filtering technology. But the main three are as follows:
Computer Spam Filtering Systems
You can buy spam filtering software which you download and install on your computer.
Depending on the type of email client you are using such as Mozilla Thunderbird and Microsoft Office Outlook, the software will integrate into your existing software and do its work as emails arrive, either accepting the emails as not spam, or moving them to junk, spam or deleting them if they get flagged.
Server Side Filtering
When someone sends you an email, it does not go directly to your computer. If this was the case, you would probably not receive most emails as you are not always on your computer or doing your emailing.
Before you receive your emails they will go to your email servers and sit awaiting for you to turn your computer and email program on.
Many of the Internet Service Providers and email hosting services use spam filtering software such as SpamAssassin in to move spam to junk on your behalf before you ever receive them.
Antivirus Programs
In my opinion, antiviruses programs have bitten off more than they can chew. To begin with security programs only focused on viruses.
Now they are also trying to do the jobs of firewalls, personal security, identity theft and stop spam emails. These security suites are becoming so big, so heavy, so exhausted and so invasive many people notice their computers slowing down immediately when they add security software to their computers.
I have seen mixed results with security programs and their handling of spam email.
How Email Filters Work
Each email filtering technology will have their own way of doing things. And a lot of it is a well kept and guarded secret.
Depending on which type of software you are using, and they type of system will determine how a filtering system works. However, below are the basics of how a Email filtering application works.
Content Filters – This is were the filtering software reads the main part of the email, the content area and looks for clues as to whether the email is spam or legitimate.
Permission – Checks to see if the sender has already sent you emails in the past. If they have generally been accepted the new email should pass filters also.
Header Information – You don’t see the header information when you read an email. It usually includes vital information about the email and where it comes from. Email filtering software will run checks on this to see if it is spam or not.
Rules – Email Spam Filtering software will check the email against a bunch of redefined rules to see if it satisfies filtering or not.
Pros and Cons
There are many pros for using and finding effective email scanning and filtering software.
Unfortunately I have never been able to find one which stayed effective for too long. They either didn’t work to begin with or after some time stopped working with the bad guys always finding new and innovative ways to circumnavigate the spam filtering systems.
The spam filtering systems on internet service providers always seem to work best and do a decent job of catching a lot of spam!
The Cons of a good email filtering system, which might not make it so good is that it either doesn’t work or is too aggressive.
If you set your filtering system too low it allows too much spam through and if you set it too high it starts blocking emails which you are wanting, such as from friends, bills, work and school etc.
You Might Have to Change Your Email Address
If you have tried everything and you don’t seem to be getting anywhere, you might have to change your email address.
The longer you have an email, the more hands it passes through and the more opportunities spammers have to use, share and send spam emails to you the harder it will be every day moving forward to stop spam emails.
I have one Hotmail address which I have had since 1997 and I still use it today. Hotmail is run and owned by power software company Microsoft. Even they with all their tech might and spam filters are unable to stop the sheer volume of spam I receive every day of an email account of this age.
A few years back I started moving all my emails from this account and created a new address which I gave people. It was a real pain but it is much better than trying to soft through all the spam emails. And in another couple of years if things don’t improve I ill probably have to create a new one again.
