Getting the Spam out of your Inbox
Email has revolutionized business communications and has brought many advantages to our day to day lives. Unfortunately not everything about email is positive, and spam is one of those negative aspects of using email. There are a number of ways to deal with the unwanted junk emails that you no doubt receive in your inbox on a daily basis, and having a quality spam filter in place will reduce frustration levels and increase the efficiency of your work day.
The two general approaches to reducing the spam mail you receive involve either filtering the messages before they get to your inbox or after they get downloaded to your inbox. To catch the spam before they get to your inbox involves having your email service provider pass all your incoming email through a filter on a server before it is passed on to your email inbox. There are a number of ways that this can be implemented and each service provider has a different way of doing it. Some automatically remove the most obvious spam and you may not even know that this is being done. Since it is only removing the emails that are obvious spam it is unlikely that it will mistakenly remove legitimate emails, but it may not catch a lot of the less obvious spam.
Other spam filters can group the spam into categories based on the likelihood that they are actually spam. This type of filter is more likely to capture a greater number of spam messages, but also may have a higher likelihood of mistakenly identifying a legitimate email as spam. In the case that this happens this type of spam filter usually includes a mechanism to allow you to review the messages marked as spam and retrieve any that you actually want to read. Because the spam messages are grouped by probability that they are spam you can just review the low probability list periodically.
The other way to filter spam out of your inbox is to filter the messages after they come into your inbox. Many email programs that are commonly used (such as Microsoft Outlook) include the ability to filter messages that come into your inbox. As the emails are downloaded from the server and into your Outlook inbox, each message is analyzed to determine whether it may be spam. The junk messages are then automatically moved into a Junk folder, leaving your inbox much clearer and more organized.
Both types of spam filters utilize a number of different factors to determine whether an email message is spam. This includes the content of the email (the words in the subject and body of the email), the email address it was sent from, and the server that the email came from. You can specify certain email addresses as people that you know, so that emails from these people aren’t ever caught by your spam filter, regardless of the fact that they may contain content that could be interpreted by the filter as spam. This is generally known as “whitelisting” the email address. You can often also enter email addresses from known spammers so that all emails from that address are caught as spam regardless of other factors.
Yes, spam is a continuing problem, and even with the spam filtering options available you will still end up with some spam in your inbox, but the tools that are available will help make your life easier. The filters will remove a large portion of the spam before you even have to look at it, leaving you with the legitimate messages that are such an important part of your work day.
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