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Struggling to tell your APIs from your CDNs? Read our comprehensive cloud computing glossary covering the most common terms.
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Email filters are essentially automated rules or algorithms that sort, organize, or take action on incoming and outgoing email messages. You can think of filters as the digital version of gatekeepers or assistants to pre-sort your emails using the criteria you have established. Filters can label, move, delete, or forward emails without any effort from the user to relieve the clutter in your inbox, as well as to save users valuable time.
Spam Filters: Among the most used type of filter is spam filters. Spam filters, which may include both behavioral and/or reputation-based filters, generally scan incoming email messages for suspicious types of content or known blacklisted senders (to filter out phishing attempts, malware attacks, or bothersome promotional emails, etc.). Spam filters also use algorithms that help scan messages for patterns, in addition to reputation databases related to senders.
Content Filters: Content filters look at the actual content of the email message itself. Content filters analyze the email message for certain keywords, attachments, phrases, etc., and act upon these identifiers. For example, an organization may want to block emails containing certain document types or blocks of confidential words or phrases, which is useful to prevent data leaks.
Address-Based Filters:These email filters act on the basis of the sender or recipient address. For example, emails can be filtered by a contact person to go to a certain folder, or emails from certain domains (that may not be known) can be flagged for review.
Organize Your Inbox: Email filters help you manage incoming volumes of email more efficiently by filtering, sorting, or labeling messages as they are received, which ultimately leads to a cleaner, more manageable inbox.
Saves Time: Filters not only organize your email but also automatically filter out spam and marketing content so you can spend less time sorting mail and more time on things that matter.
Increased Concentration: Filters help finally get rid of those annoying distractions to focus on legitimate email.
Security: The most advanced filters will help detect phishing attacks, viruses, or malicious attachments. Filters will help you stay out of serious trouble and protect you or your corporate data from cyber attacks.
Compliance and Data Management: In healthcare, or finance filters can help with compliance, and make sure your sensitive messages are tagged appropriately or not sent to secure folders, or designated outbox recipients.
Consider a human resources manager at a company who receives dozens of job applications daily. She uses email filters to automatically direct all emails with “Job Application” in the subject to a specific folder. She also sets a rule to forward resumes to a team email. Meanwhile, emails from existing employees about internal matters are sorted into separate folders based on department tags. This structured setup helps her manage workload efficiently and ensures no important message is missed.
