Improving Spam Filtering

Some email systems have spam filters built in, e.g. Google Mail or Outlook. Sometimes you need to have additional software. There are some free ones available, e.g. 0spam (pronounced zero-spam as the first character is a zero not the letter O).

Whatever you use there are two day-to-day issues:

1. Spam that gets through to your inbox. Mark it as spam, rather than just deleting it, so that your system can learn from its mistakes and be more likely to correctly identify it in the future.
2. Genuine mail that ends up in your Spam folder. You also need to review the "Spam" or "Junk Mail" folder from time to time and retrieve any items that should not be there.

Here is how to set up a filter in Google Mail (or Gmail) to stop regular items going into spam;

1. Log into your Google webmail
2. Click on Create a filter (next to Search the web button in the top centre.)
3. Choose what you want to filter by e.g. contains the word "order".
4. Click on Next step
5. Check the box next to Never send it to Spam
6. Click on Create Filter

Posted Wed 13th Aug 2008, 10:00am in Business Tips.