As false positives Spam Filter harm your business

Unless you live in a cave - and one without a computer at that - you are very familiar with the enormous waste of time sifting through mountains of spam can be. While spam is a huge annoyance for employees and end users around the world, the real costs to business are time and money and are increasing every day. As costs rise, the IT staff (in particular SMEs) are desperately looking for ways to effectively address.

It is estimated that 100 billion spam emails flying back and forth, dirtying the internet every day. A lot of these e-mails end up in the corporate email accounts, and employees are forced to spend their mornings sifting through piles of mountain of spam. This is the time you are working do not spend.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of spam filters

Installing anti-spam filter is really the only effective way to deal with daily spam within a company. These filters work to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, allowing emails through good and throwing trash in the trash. They do this by combining different types of technologies and updated almost constantly. And while the highest quality anti-spam filters provide relief, sifting out about 98% of spam companies, are still imperfect.

Why? Unfortunately, spam filters occasionally have trouble distinguishing what is and what is chaff of wheat (to stretch an already tired metaphor), and run off with some important messages to the trash. And while not often occur, 'false positive' can still become a problem for entrepreneurs.

A solution to the problem of false positives is the sensitivity setting of spam filtering company. The way this works is simple: the higher the sensitivity, spam and 'caught the most. But the greater the sensitivity, the more valid e-mail will be taken by garbage. Increase the sensitivity of anti-spam filters can cost companies a heck of a lot more money to spam too much, after all, customers do not like when their emails go ignored.

The direct and indirect cost of the Anti-Spam Filters

Even one little email 'a company can get lost in deep water. A law of companies based in Colorado, for example, lost an e-mail contains some important information about a court date and ended up losing a significant day in court. The cost? They were required to pay all fees for the counsel opposite.

How could this happen? To combat spam, the department had changed the sensitivity of their e-mail filters. Apparently, the United States District sounded pretty spammy to these filters super-hyper, and it cost the company thousands of dollars in taxes. Ouch.

While this is a good and obvious example of how false positives can lose money for the company, in most cases is simply not that cut and dried. Most of the monetary losses are not direct, but come from a loss of business and credibility. When an e-mail from a client is swallowed by the spam filter and a big deal falls through because the customer feels ignored, it takes a lot of work and public relations to get the client back. And sometimes it never happens.

In addition to directly lose a company money, false positives can affect productivity as well as an overload of spam can. If employees are accustomed to seeing a lot of their important e-mails are thrown away, you will have to spend valuable time sifting through their spam folder for the original email. How much can that cost? More than you might think. According to Ferris Research, recovering a real e-mail to a spam folder has an average cost of $ 3.50 for time dependent. Especially if you do not experience many false positives, it may not seem like much, but in a society of 500 people who have to fish the two e-mails from their spam folder a month, it adds up to $ 42,000. Sounds like an itty-bitty expenses for you?

It does for most other business owners, either. And to reduce the number of false positives - and the amount of lost business - many companies do not use spam filters at all. And while it is difficult to judge them for wanting to avoid a loss of business, going without a spam filter opens them to all kinds of problems. Taking care of spam is too important.

Finding a balance

But how do you deal with spam and minimize false positives at the same time? The best method is to put aside all messages tagged as spam into a special folder so that users will have access to it, and can check back often. While this may seem a long time, with a good anti-spam software does not actually have to be. The better the software to recognize the obvious spam, e-mail not end up in the junk folder.

As spam filters improve, so do spammers. For this reason, anti-spam filters will probably never be 100% effective - those that will delete every piece of spam in general delete some important emails with it. And let all those things are important but will also allow you a little 'trash. But with a good, well-configured anti-spam software and its integration with mail servers can really reduce the amount of spam that end users receive, as well as the rate of false positives occur .......