- The Safety (and Wisdom) of Combined Solutions
- You Know It's Spam, But What Do You Do With It?
- So How Does This Save Users Time?
- Making Quarantines Even Smarter
- Clean Your Own House
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So How Does This Save Users Time?
We told you that quarantines are not the time-wasters that simply filtering spam into an E-mail folder to sift through can be, and yet if you're reading closely, it doesn't sound that way. A useful quarantine that actually saves everyone time must be carefully implemented, and there are a number of features that you can look for in potential software to make sure that you're getting your users what both they and you need.
One feature of a useful quarantine is that it can separate listings of the user's spam from those of the user's ham. Otherwise, the users will have to sift through everything at once, and that causes a huge mess!
NOTE
Don't worry, the anti-spam software lets the ham pass through to the E-mail client; it just keeps duplicates in the quarantine. Remember how we said that Bayesian filters need to chew on ham to understand what real mail looks like? Many people only feed their learning engines spam. This isn't enough for a solid solution.
Once everything has been separated into spam and ham, the more sophisticated quarantine management systems then sort everything according to the score assigned by the filters, as discussed earlier. With this done, the spam listing can be shown in order from "the least likely to be spam" to "the most likely to be spam," and the ham listing can be shown as "the least likely to be ham" to the "most likely to be ham." This sorting works amazingly well, typically making it easy to spot good E-mail at the beginning of the spam list and bad E-mail at the beginning of the ham list, letting the user quickly instruct the filtering software to rectify the situation. No combing through huge folders of junk required!