What is a spam blocker?

  A spam blocker is a piece of software that is used to stop or limit the amount of spam email that ends up in your inbox each day.

Spam blockers have been around now for many years and have evolved from basic filters that look for certain words to highly advanced spam blockers that use some of the latest text analysis and tracking systems to identify and block spam emails from reaching your inbox.

At a basic level all spam blockers read email messages and then either marks it them as spam, lets them pass through unaltered, sends them on somewhere else or even throws them away completely.

Almost all spam blockers work on email at the destination address. So when someone sends you an email it would be passed through the spam blocker once it arrives at your mail server (See: What is a mail server). Some spam blockers work in reverse though, checking email as it is sent out. This enables Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) and corporate network administrators to cut down the amount of spam being sent out from their networks.

Most spam blockers advertise there success rate at blocking email spam, many offer protection rates as high as 98%. A protection rate of 98% would mean for example that for every 100 spam emails sent, 2 would get past the spam blocker. ClearMyMail offers a guaranteed 100% success rate… blocking all spam email from reaching your inbox.

Another important statistic that spam blockers advertise if their ‘false positive rate’. A false positive is the term given to a decision a spam blocker makes that is incorrect – it is when a spam blocker marks a legitimate email as spam. This could be an important sales enquiry or a message from a friend, and the spam blocker may of now deleted this message by mistake.

It is very important to look at this false positive rate when choosing a spam blocker. ClearMyMail offers a 0% false positive rate for almost all customers. Even if a message is incorrectly identified as spam by the ClearMyMail spam blocker then it is available for retrieval for 45 days after it was received.

     

Other guides

• 01. What is spam?
  
  
• 02. Why is junk email called spam?
  
  
• 03. How do they get my address?
  
  
• 04. Fighting back against spam.
  
  
• 05. Types of spam filtering software and how they fail.
  
  
• 06. The ClearMyMail difference.