Anti-Spam Email Techniques

Any email marketer knows that avoiding being labelled as spammers is vital in their success.  With so much spam email around, we all know what it is like to have an inbox full of rubbish. Here are a few tips to hopefully help sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to emails.

It is imperative to prevent email spam and thankfully there are techniques available for both end users and administrators to make use of.  Some are embedded into software or products in a bid to ease the burden, but no one technique is a complete solution though.  The trade off is between incorrectly rejecting legitimate emails and not rejecting spam at all.

There are four broad categories involved in anti spam techniques which are

1.    those that require an action
2.    those that can be automated by administrators
3.    those that can be automated by senders
4.    those that are used by researchers and by law enforcement

How is spam detected?

IT is a balance between false negatives and false positives.  A false negative is where spam has slipped through filters and lands in a mailbox and a false positive is where a desired email has been blocked.  It is imperative to balance these two in order to create a successful anti spam system.

A very popular method of detecting spam is in the content of the email, detecting keywords often used in spam, and can be very accurate, but they can be also make mistakes such as detecting only part of a word.  Content also does not determine if the email conforms to the two key elements of spam which are unsolicited or bulk emails.

One of the most popular methods to detect spam is through list of IP addresses of known spammers or zombie spammers called the DNS Blacklist.  In fact some blacklists actually make use of spam traps in order to catch spammers.