Tech

Why Deal With Spam With Bayesian Spam Filters?

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Receiving spam mail is incredibly annoying these days. Things are even worse in the event your email provider does not actually have an included spam filter. You would be surprised to know how much spam email you receive every single day and how much is stopped by filters. One of those filters is the Bayesian spam filter.

According to Steven Scott Bayesian specialist, this approach to filtering out junk email appeared in 1998 but it only gained popularity in 2002. Nowadays, it is quite common in identifying the email that is legitimate and the email that is just spam. Many of the modern email programs are now using advanced Bayesian spam filters and even server-side filters employ the method.

How Does This Work?

Bayesian filters work through analyzing and calculating a probability that email content is spam. What is particularly interesting is that the filters are actually constantly “learning”. They build a list of characteristics that appear with spam messages. The same thing is done for good email messages. This helps the analysis to be done in a highly effective manner. As a result we are faced with a pretty good understanding and classification of a message as being legitimate or small.

When messages are classified, the actions of the user will influence it. This is, perhaps, the biggest advantage of using the Bayesian filters.

The Spam That You Receive

Most of the spam you are going to receive is going to be related to what you do online. For instance, you might have subscribed to a specific online newsletter that is seen as being spam. The newsletter, together with the others that come from the exact same source, will normally include various common words, like email address and name. The Bayesian spam filter is going to analyze content, identify characteristics and decide that there is a high possibility messages are spam. All this is based on specific user activity since such spam messages are normally common for specific industries.

The legitimate emails that you receive are going to be different. The Bayesian anti-spam email filters are going to assign lower probability rate. This can be useful in various cases. For instance, if you have a corporate email address and you often get work emails coming from specific sources, mails are quickly identified as being completely legit. With advanced Bayesian spam filters you even get a new label added, signaling that the email received is actually important.

Time Restricted Accuracy

As already mentioned, one of the best things of the Bayesian spam filter is that accuracy keeps getting better. The more emails you get, the higher the possibility you will have messages properly listed. If an incorrect classification is identified and the user points it out, corrective training appears. That practically means that future similar messages will have much lower chances of being improperly classified.

As you can see, this is an anti-spam filter that you do want to see when you use email. You just get to receive much less spam email content.

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