Spam Blacklist - Automated Techniques For Email Administrators

Automated Techniques For Email Administrators

There are a number of appliances, services, and software systems that email administrators can use to reduce the load of spam on their systems and mailboxes. Some of these depend upon rejecting email from Internet sites known or likely to send spam. Other more advanced techniques analyze message patterns in real time to detect spam like behavior and then compares it to global databases of spam. Those methods are capable of detecting spam in real time even when there is no content (common to image based spam) and in any language. Another method relies on automatically analyzing the content of email messages and weeding out those which resemble spam. These three approaches are sometimes termed blocking, pattern detection, and filtering.

There is an increasing trend of integration of anti-spam techniques into MTAs whereby the mail systems themselves also perform various measures that are generally referred to as filtering, ultimately resulting in spam messages being rejected before delivery (or blocked).

Many filtering systems take advantage of machine learning techniques, which improve their accuracy over manual methods. However, some people find filtering intrusive to privacy, and many email administrators prefer blocking to deny access to their systems from sites tolerant of spammers.