Spam Filter

What Does Spam Filter Mean?

A spam filter is an email service feature designed to block spam from a user’s inbox. Because a large amount of global email messages are spam, effective spam filters are critical to maintaining clean and spam-free inboxes.

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Techopedia Explains Spam Filter

By keeping pesky spam emails away, spam filters increase user efficiency by sparing tedious manual sifting of legitimate messages and spam email deletion.

There is no such thing as a perfect spam filter. Even the most popular email services are susceptible to two major weaknesses:

  • Even the best spam filters are unable to block 100 percent of spam messages.
  • Legitimate emails are often routed to junk email, or spam, folders, as spam filters often misclassify legitimate emails.

Thus, even established spam filters require some manual filtering, albeit to a lesser degree.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…