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Eliminate Spam

With the magnitude of the spam problem these days, spam filtering has become standard with email accounts and it is used as a selling point. But be wary of any claims companies make that they can "eliminate" spam, especially if you are frustrated to the point that you are considering taking your hosting somewhere else because you think your current host isn't doing enough. Unless you want someone else to read your email before it gets to you, spam-filtering systems are automated and, as good as they might be, they cannot be perfect; they will let through some spam (false negatives), and will occasionally consider a legitimate message to be spam (false positives).

As always, if you throw money at a problem, you can sometimes improve it. There are subscription services in existence that have people monitoring the global flow of spam 24/7, and those people then adjust the settings of spam filters in real time. But if you thought you could get that for $4.95 a month, then you are mistaken. The vast majority of hosts including spam filtering with their hosting accounts these days are using a program called SpamAssassin, which is a very good Open-Source program which makes so many lives easier because of the amount of spam it filters. But it's not updated by a team of crack anti-spammers working for you day and night -- although the program itself and the rules it uses are updated often, but your host may not be updating the software and the rules that often.

Again, as with the other claims described on this site, take any claim that a host can "eliminate" spam with a grain of salt. Unless they are a company whose sole (or, at least, primary) purpose is spam filtering, they're probably just using the same spam filter that most other hosts are using.

Relevant links:

Best Spam received by Vadim Makarov

Quote: "Spam is kept under some sort of control by continuous investment of time both by me and my provider." (Emphasis by the author. Don't believe any company that says dealing with spam takes no effort.)

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