Email Filters - An Evolving Technology - Free Download

Email filters aren't particularly new, but their nature and purpose has changed substantially in the last few years. Fundamentally, all filters do the same thing. They evaluate email messages based on content or other information, and then hopefully perform an appropriate action.

Most of the earlier filters were intended to identify email sent to a specific distribution list, and then file it accordingly. This email was nearly always wanted by the end-user, but didn't necessarily belong in the inbox along with other messages sent directly to them. This kind of filtering is still widely in use.

Today, almost all email filters are intended to block junk email. The software requirements for this kind of filter are much more complex than simply sorting email sent to distribution lists. The core difference is that spammers have a strong profit motive to make sure that their email messages make into user's inboxes. For this reason, spammers generally don't label their emails as commercial. Frequently, they even take steps to hide indicators that their message is spam. Examples of this include obfuscating certain words such as, "v!@gra".

To cope with spammer's tactics, numerous new approaches to blocking spam email have been introduced. These email filters include various forms of artificial intelligence such as baysian filtering, fuzzy logic and collective learning.

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