What is a smart Email spam filter?

What is a smart Email spam filter? An email has become a familiar part of everyday life. In fact, both professionally and privately, many of us today would not be able to function without a combination of email and text at our disposal. Unfortunately, however, email can also bring with it a number of non-trivial problems, including the dreaded Spam.

What is spam?

Almost from the day that large-scale public email was born, a variety of legitimate and corrupt business interests saw it as a great opportunity.

Perhaps few of us have been fortunate enough to completely avoid the need to go through loads of unsolicited emails that, in most cases, are trying to advertise something we are not interested in or others, perhaps looking to defraud us.

This is collectively called "Spam" and for many years the IT industry has been trying to find ways to prevent it from reaching us. Surprisingly, this is not as easy as it sounds.

A porous barrier

Clearly, there are a lot of emails that you will want to receive. In many cases, they may be from people or companies that you may not have dealt with before, but still want to see their communication.

Hopefully, it will also be apparent that you want emails from your established contacts to reach you.

In many situations, the organization that provides your email services will have implemented something called a "spam filter." In the early days these were pretty crude, often simply stopping emails originating from known spam sources or simply from an ID that your email provider didn't recognize.

The problem was, as many people will have experienced and perhaps still do today, those filters just weren't precisely engineered. In other words, too many legitimate emails were being blocked and that could and can cause serious difficulties.

The difficulty for the service provider is that there are so many 'feature hints' that they can use to automatically detect something that they know you won't want to receive. For much of the time in the past, they were reduced to doing what they hoped to be smart guesses, and sometimes they just got it wrong.

That resulted in the tedious task of constantly having to check your service provider's discard box to make sure they haven't accidentally blocked something important that comes your way.

Modern spam filters

The good news is that things have changed in recent years. Modern IT support companies that provide spam filters allow their customers to tag received emails to indicate whether they are spam or not. Over time, the filtering software learns from the preferences expressed by users, allowing it to apply increasingly refined blocking filters to incoming emails.

Admittedly, this requires some initial patience on the part of the user in terms of looking at the discard pile and clicking on any that shouldn't have been blocked.

For email automation, omnisend is recommended.