How Email Spam Blocking Works

This article is about how email accounts and Internet Service Providers filter out spam. How to get around these spam blockers will come in a future article. It is important to understand what is considered spam and how it is blocked if you want to get around it. First of all, you should not be sending spam, but non-spam messages are frequently interpreted as spam, and as an email marketer, you do not want to be blocked.

Most email services come with spam filters, which allow users to block mail that is considered unsolicited or scammy. Spam filters work by analyzing emails and finding keywords and phrases associated with spam. They also analyze the structure and format of the email, including grammar and punctuation. The primary form of spam filtering is Bayesian spam filtering, which is a simple yet extremely mathematical way of separating spam from legitimate email (in fact, one of the first Bayesian spam filters developed was about only fifty lines of code). The program uses Bayes' theorem, which relates to probability (in the case of spam, the probability that an email is spam). When using Bayesian filtering, users initially have to separate spam from real email, and the Bayesian filter analyzes the spam and real emails and determines which words are most present in spam email and which in regular emails. Then when emails are received, the filter reads it and sees the ratio of spam words to non-spam words. If the ratio is significantly high, the application marks it as spam and either puts it in the junk, bulk, or spam folder (or in some cases, simply deletes it).

Not only do email services have spam filters, but also ISPs themselves have methods of filtering out spam. ISPs will usually block email if the number of recipients is too high, there is an excessive amount of links, or spam-associated words and phrases are present. Once an ISP has blocked email from your IP address a certain number of times, they will blacklist you. When you are blacklisted, most of the email messages you try to send, especially marketing related ones, will simply not be sent, or will be returned to you undelivered. ISPs will also greylist emails based on how the email server sends them (and not on the content of the messages). Greylisting, like blacklisting, returns emails to you undelivered, but unlike blacklisting, it works on a per-email basis. For example, one email you send may be greylisted, and the next you send may not.

How Email Spam Blocking Works

A final type of list is the whitelist, which is purely on the user side. A whitelist is basically an address book, and if a sender is not part of that address book, their mail will not be delivered. However, a whitelist has flaws, since Internet users frequently get mail that is legitimate but from unknown addresses, so all that mail would be blocked. Some whitelists protocols, when getting an email from an unknown address, return the sender a confirmation email they must click before the recipient actually receives the original email.

Spam combatant software is getting more and more advanced everyday, and the results of email marketing are declining proportionally. A quick tip, which will be elaborated on later, is that you will not be blocked if you do not send spam.

How Email Spam Blocking Works
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