What is a spam filter?
A spam filter will keep you safe and secure
Have you ever wondered how emails are forwarded to your spam folder? If you check your spam folder, you’ll probably notice a couple of spam emails sitting there. Spam emails are everywhere, and they can contain anything from winning a car to taking out a loan.
Brief Summary
A spam filter is a tool that helps to keep unwanted emails out of your inbox. It checks emails for potential spam with various methods, and iflags them as spam if f they don’t pass the threshold.
So how do email providers know that certain emails are, in fact, spam emails? Every time an email enters your inbox, your email provider uses its spam filter. The spam filter has a couple of features they check with the help of algorithms to decide whether the email is a spam email. Most spam filters have a threshold, and if an email passes the test, it can go on through to your inbox. If it doesn’t and falls below the threshold, that’s calculated based on algorithms; as mentioned above, it’s automatically sent to your spam folder.
Bayesian filtering
One popular and well-known filtering method is called Bayesian filtering. It’s a complex process and method that identifies certain words and phrases with spam messages. Simultaneously, it also identifies other words and phrases with legitimate emails that are sent to you. Based on these two processes, it calculates the probability of an incoming email being spam or not. Unlike other email spam filters, this method looks at everything from the body of the email to the header, metadata and other technical aspects of the actual email.
What’s even better is that the filter learns over time. Every time you receive emails, both spam and legitimate emails, the filter studies and understands the construct of these emails to calculate more accurately in the future.
However, as the filter gets better over time, so does the process of the people who are sending out these spam emails. An example of this is when writing ‘Instead’, you might see ‘1nstead’. This is an attempt from the spammer to confuse spam filters that are not so smart by writing ‘1’ instead of ‘I’.
Why is a spam filter important?
Having a spam email filter is very important as it protects you from just that – spam. Every day, spam emails are becoming more intelligent and wiser. Their content gets better, and they have new methods to try and go past spam filters. Thankfully, we are all smart enough to detect a spam email in our inbox most of the time. However, there is still a risk that we might mistake a cleverly written spam email for a legitimate email. The last thing we want to do is reply to a spam email and invite viruses and ransomware into our computers. Thus, having a good spam filter is key to make sure that you stay protected.
Virus and spam filter with one.com
At one.com, all your email accounts are equipped with a virus and spam filter. This is activated by default. Our spam filters are in line with the highest standards in spam-fighting technology, with features including a blocked senders overview and trusted senders feature.
If any emails are detected as spam or phishing, they will automatically be moved to your spam folder. Additionally, if any emails are seen as harmful viruses, they will immediately be deleted.
