BYPASSING THE SPAM FILTER

It is also important to note that most spam filters allow you to exclude specific e-mails from being checked.  This is often referred to as a “White List”.  These excluded e-mails are never identified as spam and will be delivered.

Often specific e-mail address can be directly added to the white list; e.g. john@myclient.com.  Alternatively, wild card characters are supported so that entire domains can be excluded, ;e.g. *@myclient.com will exclude e-mails from any sender at myclient.com.

Most spam filters will automatically add all of the addresses in the recipients address book to the white list.  However, this usually requires the recipient to use the address book on their Web mail.  It will not check to see what addresses are contained in an e-mail client; such as Outlook, Outlook Express, or Eudora. 

It is critical that clients be added to the white lists in spam filters to be sure that those important work e-mails are never blocked as spam. 

Spam is an epidemic and as spam filtering improves, the spammers get more creative to find ways around it.  For example, an image can never be read as text by a spam filter.  Spammers may send an image file, rather than plain text.  This is a very simple way to completely eliminate the effectiveness of a Bayesian filter.

Therefore, there is no cure-all for getting rid of unwanted e-mail.  If you don’t have a problem with spam, you are most likely missing many legitimate e-mails as well.  That can cost you money – you may be losing opportunities with new clients. 

Using spam filters can be an effective means of reducing the burden of spam, but if you don’t understand how they work it can be very harmful to your business.  Administering e-mail is not a simple task, nor is one that should be ignored.  Do some research; check with your ISP or e-mail administrator to see what you can do make your anit-spam efforts more effective.  The last thing you want is to block email from your clients, or potential clients.  Not only does this happen, but many people may not even be aware of the problem.