What Do Spam Filters Look For In Emails?
Indeed all of us have had to report individual emails as spam due to junk overloading the inboxes. Some are already marked as spam and automatically transferred to the spam folder. But have you ever wondered what is a spam filter and how does it work? Let’s try to answer these questions and find out what do spam filters look for in an email.
Spam Filter Methodology
Various spam filtering techniques are used by spam filters to filter out spam emails. They then deliver an approvable inbox to you without your having to go through the brunt of reading unwanted emails. Whether paid or free email spam filters, they search for anything characteristic to spam messages in the emails received in the inbox or sent out from it. For instance, mentioning certain words in the email might prove to be not approvable and thus marked as spam.
Each criterion is sorted according to its score. The email content and the total score decide whether it will be treated as spam or not. Spam filtering solutions primarily watch the texts’ subject and then exclude them from the inbox if it does not fit the criteria score after judging the emails. Some of the best email spam filters, like the Bayesian filters, sift through spam emails by identifying suspicious word patterns or word frequency.
Factors That Spam Filters Look For
Most spam filters nowadays are quite complex and apply various advanced criteria for spam filtering. Each spam filter solution could have its approach. Thus the functioning of spam filter Gmail could be different from that of another email domain.
Sometimes, one particular characteristic might satisfy some criterion of spam more than any other. Even if you use the best free spam filter or paid one, the spam topics might fluctuate like tides and are mostly triggered by current events. For instance, a word or sentence in an email that used to be harmless earlier would be extreme spam content today.
Here are the areas in an email that the spam filters look into to filter out spam:
- The Addressor’s line (‘from’ line)
- The Addressee’s line (to /Cc: line)
- Subject line
- Body of the text – including spam topics, links, grammar and spelling, language and character sets, images, and spacing
- Unseen headers
The user can also customize or ‘train’ the email’s spam filter. One must mark the real spam emails as spam and correct those that are falsely marked as spam.
Overcoming Spam Filters
If you send emails for genuine marketing purposes, understanding the probability of the message being marked as spam and how to avoid spam filters will help you draft the content of the emails carefully.
A single characteristic is not sufficient to determine the outcome of whether an email would be marked spam or not. But what actually can be done is understanding what do spam filters look for in an email.
With all this information that helps you figure out what email spam filters look for and how to deal with all the spam in the inbox, you can be well-equipped to deal with all the inbox spam and also avoid getting genuine emails marked as spam if you’re sending them for marketing or transactional purposes.
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