Email hosting has its own stringent measures in fighting spam and protecting emails from viruses, malware and spyware. These measures include proprietary algorithmic software to mark an email as spam or not. The software uses stop words associated with spam and junk emails. If words, such as FREE, SALE and DISCOUNTS, deemed suspicious are in the email’s subject line or inside the body, then those emails go straight to the Spam folder.

However, users still hold the final decision whether to mark an email as safe or spam. All the senders whose emails were marked SPAM by email hosting users were included in a real-time blackhole list, which the email filter software uses to track spam activity. To strengthen the filter’s performance, email hosting makes use of other blackhole lists, such as SPAMCOP, to reduce the entry of spam.

Admittedly, some emails get binned because of a word or two, but these emails come from a safe and legitimate online business. These emails are false positives. To improve the performance of email hosting filters, reduction of false positives is called for. Through an advanced heuristics engine, which is part of the proprietary algorithmic software, each email goes under scrutiny, particularly focusing on its headers for signs of modification. The software also looks for repetition of words and compares emails with known formats of spam emails.

Links in emails are also circumspect and automatically scanned for suspicious activity, such as redirects to virus-laden sites. The antivirus software scans each email based on a virus definitions file, which receives updates as often as 24 times each day. Scanning happens the moment you received the email to ensure that whatever virus is contained in that message will not get past the security measures. Users can confidently open any email they want without fear of contaminating the system.