A spam filter is an email service feature that filters and quarantines spam emails from a user’s inbox. It ensures a clean and spam-free mailbox for the user that saves productive energy and provides a high level of work efficiency. A spam filter has become a necessity in recent times as cyber adversaries rigorously work to find and exploit vulnerabilities. Sending spam and phishing emails is one of the most preferred and lucrative ways which they can use to lure users into falling into their trap.
A spam filter service detects unsolicited and unwanted email and wipes them out from a user’s mailbox. Different spam filters have various mechanisms for segregating spam from legitimate emails; however, they all strive to attain a common goal – making sure that only genuine and informative emails reach the end-user.
Spam Filtering Techniques And Usage:
Blacklist filter: This is a relatively easy way of identifying spam email. In this system, the filter has been pre instructed to avoid emails sent from specific senders or addresses – known as a blacklist. Any mail from a blacklisted person or email address gets auto marked as spam.
Content filter: A spam filter might work by following a content filtering system, whereby it will review the content of every email sent to the user. By doing so, it tries to determine if it is a spam email or not.
Rules-based filter: This is very similar to the blacklist filter but contains an added feature. In this filter, a user can not only blacklist users but can also blacklist words. In case an email has any of the blacklisted terms or happens to be sent by a blacklisted user, it gets auto marked as spam.
Header filter: Another way a spam filter works is by reviewing the header of every email sent to the user, searching for falsified information, or other signs that could confirm whether the email is spam.
Permission filter: This spam filter makes it mandatory for any email sender to be pre-approved by the recipient. This way, only known persons can reach out to you. Although the permission filter is a great way to ensure security from spam, it kills the prospect of authentic and genuine business or academic emails reaching you by becoming a barrier in communication.
Challenge-response filter: This filter is similar to the permission filter and requires a sender to enter a code to gain permission to send an email to the recipient.
The primary task of a spam filter is the segregation of spam emails from genuine ones. It is done by enabling a user to distinguish between the approved and unapproved email addresses. Approved addresses or white addresses are the ones that have been marked as safe by the user. On the other hand, the unapproved or blacklisted addresses are the ones that have been marked as dangerous, unimportant, or spam. Any email from an approved address goes straight to the user’s mailbox. In contrast, all emails from blacklisted sources get auto blocked or deleted based on the instructions that the user feeds into the system.
You can read more about Spam Filters here.
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