How to choose the right anti-spam software?

With the growing number of anti-spam programs on the market, choosing the right one is becoming increasingly difficult. This type of protection can be installed on the user’s workstation, on the mail server or outsourced. Once anti-spam software installation has been defined, it’s time to compare the software available on the market. What are the criteria for differentiating good anti-spam software from others?

Firstly, there are the anti-spam technologies used, such as lexical analysis, blacklists, Bayesian filters, greylisting,Teer grubing, etc. All these technologies have undeniable qualities, but they also have their weaknesses. Good anti-spamming software combines a number of technologies, enabling more effective cross-analysis.

Secondly, the quality of anti-spam software is defined by its false positive and false negative rates. False positives are legitimate e-mails identified by the protection software as spam. The false positive rate is an important factor in the choice of antspam software. Indeed, users don’t want legitimate e-mails containing important information to be quarantined. This can have far-reaching consequences for companies. False negatives are non-legitimate e-mails that are not identified by anti-spam software.

False negatives are a critical issue for anti-spam software providers. This is because their software has to minimize false positives while maintaining a correct false-negative rate. The performance of anti-spam software is often measured by the false positive and false negative rates it generates. The duality of these two rates is a real headache for anti-spam editors, as they have to guarantee a low false positive rate, while at the same time providing high-performance e-mail interpretation to prevent users’ mailboxes from being invaded by spam, without forgetting to keep false negatives to a minimum.

To choose the right antispam software, you need to check the technologies it uses, that the false positive and false negative rates are low enough, and that the software allows you to recover false positives easily.