SPAM… emails you don’t want and haven’t signed up for. They’ll always be with us in huge volumes.
But how do you make sure you get all the emails you want and none of the ones you don’t want? The most common approach is to use spam management tools such as Sophos PureMessage or cloud filtering services from providers like Symantec.
The problem is, these tools work on software filters that try to differentiate between spam and the emails you want. And because they can’t be perfect for everyone all of the time, they allow you to set for yourself just how ferocious you want them to be.
In practice this means you get one of two results:
- Less ferocious: you get nearly 100% of what you want plus some spam, or
- More ferocious: you get no spam but some of the emails you do want get wrongly identified and ‘quarantined’.
The best spam filtering services provide a ‘quarantine digest’ once or twice a day so you can check to see if an email you want has been trapped.
As most users really don’t want any spam, and therefore filters are usually set quite tight, it becomes critically important that you check your quarantine digest emails when they arrive.
That extra chore is the price we pay to eliminate spam.