Email has become a familiar part of everyday life.
In fact, both professionally and privately, many of us today couldn’t function without a combination of email and text at our disposal. Unfortunately, however, email can also bring with it a number of non-trivial problems, including the dreaded spam.
What is spam?
Almost from the day large-scale public email was born, a variety of legitimate and corrupt business interests saw it as a huge opportunity.
Perhaps few of us have been lucky enough to completely avoid the need to go through piles of unsolicited emails that, in most cases, try to advertise something that does not interest us or others, perhaps seeking to defraud us.
This is collectively called “spam” and for many years the IT industry has been trying to find ways to prevent it from reaching us. Surprisingly, this is not as easy as it might seem.
a porous barrier
Clearly, there’s a lot of email you’ll want to receive. In many cases, they can be from people or companies that you may not have dealt with before, but still want to see their communication.
It’s also obvious that you want emails from your established contacts to reach you.
In many situations, the organization that provides your email services will have implemented something called a “spam filter.” In the early days these were pretty crude and often just stopped emails coming in that originated from known spam sources or just an ID your email provider didn’t recognize.
The problem was, as many people will have experienced and perhaps still do today, those filters simply weren’t precisely engineered. In other words, too many legitimate emails were blocked and that could and still can cause serious difficulties.
The difficulty for the service provider is that there are so many ‘feature clues’ they can use to automatically detect something they know you don’t want to receive. For much of the time in the past, they were reduced to making what they hoped were intelligent guesses, and sometimes they were just wrong.
That led to the tedious task of constantly having to check your service provider’s drop box to make sure they hadn’t accidentally blocked something important coming to you.
Modern spam filters
The good news is that things have changed in recent years.
Modern IT support companies that provide spam filters allow their customers to label received emails to indicate whether they are spam or not. Over time, filter software learns from users’ expressed preferences, allowing it to apply increasingly refined blocking filters to incoming email.
Admittedly, this requires some initial patience from the user in terms of looking at the discard pile and clicking on any that shouldn’t have been blocked.
However, this is usually a relatively short process, and after a modest amount of time, modern spam filters should be surprisingly accurate in terms of passing you the materials you’d like to see and blocking the ones you don’t.
If you don’t already have such a system, it might be worth asking about them for more information.
