Anti-Spam Filters: Why Are They Important to You

Email is one of the most important forms of communication in today’s world and if there’s one thing that is decreasing the credibility of emails, it is spam. Spam messages are those that are irrelevant to the receiver, may or may not contain malicious content and are most probably ads or sales push of a product/service the receiver is not interested in. But that shouldn’t be so bad right? Spam constitutes 60% of the emails circulated each day, thus decreasing the credibility of emails rapidly. So the answer is it is pretty bad.

While anybody would find spam annoying, business organizations face the maximum wrath of spam messages, affecting their productivity and wasting their resources. Usage of anti-spam filters is the only way to limit spamming to a great extent, increase productivity and avoid malicious attacks. Read on to know more.

What are Anti-Spam Filters?

In order to tackle spam messages, many business organizations and institutions use spam filters to filter out the spammy IP addresses and malicious content. The anti-spam technology involves a number of filters like content based filters, list based filters, collaborative filters etc. For example, a content based filter would search for malicious content and attachments in a mail and filter them out before it your reaches your mail inbox. Similarly a list based filter would block all the black listed IP addresses and look for new ones to create separate lists namely black list and white list IP addresses. In simple, a black list is a list of IP addresses you avoid and white list is a list of IP addresses that you trust.

3 Reasons Why You Should Use Anti-Spam Filters

1.Spam is very bad for your team’s productivity

When you are using email as the official means of the company, your email server transfer thousands of mails every day. The emails are official and pretty important to ignore. If 60% of your employee’s inbox is filled spam mails, your employee will have a hard time finding the relevant mails and each time deleting new spam. This is distracting and also frustrating on the employee’s mindset given that they have a job to do.

2. Spam is expensive for your company

It is not just the productivity we are talking about, it is also about the maintenance of your email server. If 60% of the mails the inbox transfers are spam messages, it is a waste of resource and a waste of time for your technical end. And if those spam messages are malicious, the repercussions are much more expensive. Anti-spam filters identify such content and filter them out.

3. A spam is not always just a spam

A spam message is not always a sales push or an unwanted advertisement. A few messages are deliberately planted with viruses, malwares and trojan horses to infiltrate your email server and eventually infiltrate your computer system. This is a serious security threat and the bigger the company, the higher the risks. Thus anti-spam filters won’t just reduce the redundancy in your emails but also play a major role in fighting security threats.