Effective spam filtering techniques

Manually filtering spam from your email inbox can take up a large amount of valuable time. Using an effective anti-spam filter will stop unwanted junk mail from getting to your inbox in the first place, ensuring that you can spend your time on more important tasks. There are a number of options available for spam filtering, and none of them can offer a guarantee that they will block all spam entering your inbox. However, here are some of the most effective techniques used by the best spam filters:

Common word lists

There are a number of words and phrases typically found in spam emails, and effective spam filters use lists of these words and phrases as criteria to decide whether an email is considered spam. Common spam triggers include words and phrases such as “improve your income”, “meet local babes” and “mortgage”.

Blacklisting

Effective spam filters also add any known IP addresses of companies sending spam to a blacklist. This means that any emails sent from this IP address will be directed straight to your spam folder. Similarly, the software will include your contact list on a whitelist. This means that any emails sent by your trusted contact list will make its way to your inbox.

Analysis of previous emails

An effective spam filter will look for patterns in the history of your email account, which are then applied to incoming emails to assess whether they are legitimate emails or spam. Bayesian filtering techniques analyse the content of each email that you send and receive, recording typical word patterns associated with each type of email. Consequently, it can analyse messages coming into your account using the typical word patterns, and use this to decide where the message should be directed to: your inbox or your junk mail folder.

None of the above techniques are effective when used in isolation. An effective spam filter will use a combination of the above techniques to make sure that the amount of spam to find its way into your inbox is kept to a minimum. Ideally, all techniques should be used together.