What Can You Do When Your Spam Filter blocks more of the good e-mails?
The war against spam is a cat-and-mouse game with spammers working relentlessly to outwit the spam filters.
Recently, we heard of a story where a law firms’ employees complained to their IT shop that they where getting to much spam even though the IT shop installed and configured spam filters on their email servers. To remedy this problem the IT shop increased filtering and the levels of spam were drastically decreased. But, their was a negative effect. Important emails where not getting through the filers and as a result this wound up costing the law firm money due to missed client appointments.
Their email filters were deleting important emails from clients in what are called false positives. A false positive is where the spam filter takes a negative action on what is really a valid email.
Since spam filters may never be 100% effective it is good practice to quarantine, and not to delete, all e-mails marked as spam into a spam folder. The folder should be accessible to all e-mail users so they can review the list of quarantine emails prior them being deleted.
It may be time consuming for email users to review their spam messages but this practice helps stop the automatic deletion of false positive valid emails.
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