Anti-Spam Technologies Review - Part 1

Keyword List:

Simple and complex lists of words that are known to be associated with spam. For example, "viagra".

Pros:
This approach can be used to identify some spam messages, especially in the early days of spam.

Cons:
It fails to recognize word variations or context. Spammers can use word variation to bypass the filter. Therefore, it's not effective when spam has become a major problem on the internet. And keyword list can results in many false positives as well (legitimate email misidentified as spam).

Allow List

Lists that contain email addresses from which email will never get blocked. This is actually not an anti-spam technology, rather, it's a technology used to protect legitimate senders.

Pros:
Is good for protecting email from known senders.

Cons:
It actually does nothing to stop spam. If users rely only on white list-based filter to receive email, that is, block all other email which is not originated from the white listed addresses, it will cause very high false positive rate, i.e. legitimate mail being incorrectly blocked.

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