False Positives

According to a recent survey about 40% of workers have missed a deadline due to an email getting intercepted by a spam filter that shouldn't have been.

In recent years, ISPs have deployed more aggressive spam killers that catch more email. Unfortunately, the filters aren't necessarily more accurate. Often system administrators will simply declare victory when they've managed to reduce the total spam seen by users, with little concern about missed legitimate email.

Anti-spam firms understandably tend to quote the total number of emails their system has blocked as being equivalent to the total number of spam messages. This of course isn't exactly the case.

Some service providers see spam as an effective, "denial of service" attack. The number of incoming email messages is so great, that if they allowed them to all be delivered, the server would effectively be shutdown.

The problem is compounded by end-users installing email tools such as Incredimail that add junk HTML to their messages along with pictures of dancing cats. This, "junkware" injects email messages with many components that anti-spam e-mail filters consider to be indicative of spam.

Other automated messages such as order confirmations also are more prone to be accidentally caught by spam blockers. On the flip side, many users email accounts are unusable unless the use some level of filtering.

SpamButcher's trial version is a free anti-spam software download and can be obtained from this website.

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