Different Types of Spam Filtering Methods

Posted by Joseph Marie
3
Jun 21, 2016
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There’s probably no email account holder in the world who hasn’t been a victim of spamming till date. Any unwanted mail that ends up in your mailbox every hour, eats up your computing resources and kills your productivity could be termed as spam. But what if more than 60% of the mails you receive everyday are spam messages? And what if few of those mails have harmful viruses, malwares and Trojan horses in them? It’s not just spam anymore; it’s a nuisance and a potential security threat.

Though we might ignore spam in our personal mailboxes, business organizations can’t do so because there’s a lot at stake, productivity and security to begin with. Spam filtering is possibly the only way to control at least 99% of the spam and here’s everything you need to know about it.

What is Spam Filtering?

In order to identify spam and eliminate potential security threats, email security and management services setup a mail exchange record between the source and destination email servers. These mail exchange records are equipped with a number of spam filters that identify any kind of spam in both inbound and outbound emails.

Apart from identifying spam and blocking the IP addresses that spread these unwanted messages, the mail exchange record also acts as an efficient antivirus/firewall. Spam filtering is used by most of the business organizations which use email as their main means of communication.

Different Types of Spam Filtering Methods

Different types of filters are used in email filtering and each filter is essentially a new spam filtering method. Below mentioned are two of the most widely used spam filters in business organization.

1.  List Based Filters

These filters are essentially based on the exhaustive list of blacklisted and whitelisted IP addresses which are to be avoided and allowed respectively. These lists are updated on a regular basis and newer methods are implemented to counter attack newer spamming methods. Apart from blacklists and whitelists, there are also other spam filtering methods like realtime blackhole lists and greylists.

2.  Content Based Lists

Rather than focusing on blocking IP addresses, content based filters try to block spam by scanning each mail passing through the mail exchange record for spam content. Be it words or keywords or malicious attachments, these lists are updated regularly to identify spam patterns within the mail content.

Advantages of Spam Filtering in Business Organizations

•  Firstly, spam filters or email filters are way cheaper than the losses business face due to security breaches, productivity losses and degradation of employee morale.

•  There is no need to setup a new email system as these spam filtering techniques can be directly integrated into an organization’s existing email system.

•  These services will be offered by third party vendors who will take care of all the technical aspects of the filtering and even offer 24/7 technical assistance.

•  The interface of the filtering scheme is pretty easy to use and requires no formal training as such.

Securence is a leading provider of enterprise email filtering software that offers email protection and security services such as encrypted email, spam filtering, email archiving and continuity solutions to small and large businesses. To learn more about our email filtering solutions, visit http://www.securence.com/solution/.
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