How to Stop Spam from Clogging Up Your Inbox

Spam takes up precious space in your inbox and makes it difficult to find the emails that legitimately require your attention, especially in a professional setting. Not only that, but it is oftentimes the vehicle through which security problems reach your business’s network. Figuring out how to stop spam from clogging up your inbox can save you a lot of time and money.

Manually, you can remove this junk that comes your way, but it can be difficult to effectively manage these unsolicited communications when your entire organization is trying to deal with it. 

Fortunately, IT providers offer more comprehensive spam filtering systems that can protect your company’s infrastructure. With intelligent spam filtering, you can sort worthwhile emails from spam with ease and prevent malicious messages from causing problems to your system.

What Is Spam?

The term is commonly used, but do you really know what spam is? Spam emails are any emails that are unsolicited or irrelevant. They can be either harmless and annoying communications or malicious messages that are sent to spread malware or steal from you.

Spam emails can include the following:

• Advertising and marketing emails
• Phishing emails
• Finance scams
• Malware spam

The word spam might also be used to refer to comments on forums and blogs, text messages, and other forms of communication that are unwanted.

How Does Spam Filtering It Work?

Without a filter, your email inbox can quickly fill up with spam emails. A clogged inbox makes it harder to find and respond to bona fide emails because they get buried underneath all the spam. 

You could spend a lot of time trying to sort through and delete spam emails in an effort to prevent your employees from being taken in by them. However, spam filtering, or taking measures to stop spam from making its way to your email inbox, provides a solution to this annoying problem. When you use a spam filter, junk emails are flagged and sent to a different folder or deleted.

Spam filters look at the sender’s information and scan attachments to look for danger to your computer. They compare data from emails against a database of threats and may use technology such as machine learning to detect spam.

Why Your Business Needs Spam Filtering

Businesses benefit from spam filtering in a number of impactful ways. Without an efficient spam filter, your organization could be dealing with cybersecurity threats daily. Additionally, employees could waste a lot of valuable company time dealing with spam.

Protect Against Viruses and Malware

Spam filters protect your business from viruses and malware. They scan emails and their attachments to catch any files, links, or communications meant to harm your computer. By filtering out potential dangers, these filters prevent your business’s employees from opening emails that they shouldn’t. It’s one of the key levels of defense against viruses that your company should be using.

Save Time

Taking the necessary steps to find out how to stop spam from reaching your mailbox saves time for everyone, ultimately saving your company money. Emails don’t need to be sorted through, potential cybersecurity issues are addressed before they affect your company’s ability to function, and your IT team can focus on helping your company reach its goals.

Customize for Your Business’s Needs

Spam filters can be customized to meet the individual needs of any organization. Custom filters allow businesses to select which emails they want to filter out, as well as whitelist senders that they want to ensure never end up in the spam folder. This guarantees that you can filter out anything that you don’t want to see while allowing approved emails to end up in your inbox.

Types of Spam Filters

There are different types of spam filters that may be used to to stop spam emails from getting into your inbox. They can include list-based filters, content-based filters, and other filtering methods. Here are some of the different spam filters that you might come across.

Bayesian Filter

A Bayesian filter is a content-based spam filter that offers a sophisticated way to filter out spam. It uses mathematical probability to work out which emails are spam and which are not. This type of filter uses machine learning, which must be “trained” by the user first through manual flagging of spam. As it learns, it will take characteristics from legitimate and spam emails and add them to lists to compare against future emails.

Rule-based Filter

A rule-based filter, also called a heuristic filter, looks at multiple terms in an email to determine whether it is spam. They assign points to words and phrases, with terms associated with spam given higher points. The filter then calculates a score and marks emails with a certain score as spam.

List-based Filters

List-based filters include the use of blacklists, whitelists, and graylists. They are based on the principle of categorizing senders as spammers or trusted senders. A blacklist relies on identifying senders to block, while a whitelist identifies trusted senders. A graylist works by rejecting the first attempt to send an email, and only accepting if the server attempts to send it again.