Spam Filtering

Introduction

Anyone who has had email is well familiar with the often sloppy, bungling menace that is spam. You know that that Nigerian prince that keeps telling you he found money with your name on it? Or that email from an unknown source with an unknown attachment? Yes, those are examples of annoying (and sometimes funny) spam emails. Spam filtering helps email users steer clear of these at-the-least unwanted annoyances and at-the-most serious threats by using different measures to filter them from your email inbox. 

This article will detail what spam filtering is, including the different types of spam filtering and how they work. Understanding the modern email threat landscape would be difficult without first understanding spam filtering.

Spam

No, spam is not referring to the canned meat that helped feed Hawaii during the Second World War. Rather, this well-known email-based annoyance refers to unsolicited messages. It should be noted that while different types of messages can qualify as spam, this article will focus on spam emails.

Spam filtering

But let’s add a bit of perspective to this. 

There are approximately 269 billion email messages sent daily, and nearly half of all of these messages are spam. Spam is a multi-billion-dollar global money-making scam and can be a threat to users, systems and information. This is not a new problem.

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The solution to avoid most of this spam is known as spam filtering.

What is spam filtering?

Spam filtering refers to the practice of detecting unwanted, unsolicited and malware-infested emails and stopping these emails from reaching user email inboxes. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and email normally implement spam filtering, and third-party providers offer their spam filtering services online.

How does spam filtering work?

There are different types of spam filtering in use today and they all work slightly (Read more...)