Is email spam on the increase?
July 14, 2014 Elyas SulemanYou may have noticed recently that email spam is increasing. Some people have experienced a large increase whilst others have seen a very small or no increase at all.
The reasons for this are divided into two categories:
1. At some point everyone will see a slight surge in spam because the spammers are becoming more sophisticated and finding ways to get through the spam filters. However, if you are using a good web hosting or email hosting company then chances are that their filter will quickly learn this trend and automatically apply changes to the filter to ensure that no more of such spam gets through. Additionally if your web hosting provider is good at this then they will deploy additional systems to combat this. We call this the evolution of spam and spam filters.
2. Spammers are using manual methods to send out emails. Now, although this is not automated or has very little automation it means that the job becomes harder for the spammers but is also quite difficult for spam filters. However, the good spam filters include content filtering to score the content being received but there is a minute chance of false-positives where genuine email may be blocked or false-negatives where one or two spam messages get through.
Our advice is to have a good system in place that balances all of this out and is up-to-date which includes filtering technology on the mail server in addition to an extra barrier such as SpamExperts Cloud-filtering which filters out 99% of spam even before it reaches the mail server. The remaining 1% then goes through additional checks on the server filtering system before being accepted or rejected. This has worked superbly for ourselves and many clients that we have implemented this for.
