If your email inbox has turned into a wall of spam, you’re not the only one. Spam email is one of the top complaints we’ve been hearing about lately, and a significant portion comes from Bigpond subscribers.
Some affected users are handing over $79 a year for the Telstra Paid Email service and explicit garbage emails still cruise right past the filter. As a paid service, users have the right to expect a better product.
Telstra’s advice is just to mark the messages as spam and train the filter. As a long term solution, that works, but it doesn’t help much in the short term because training a spam filter can take months.
Why spam gets past your provider
All email providers run server-side filtering, but none has a perfect solution. Spammers use different sender addresses and fresh domains to circumvent filters. Messages that don’t contain a link or attachment that instead phish for a phone call or personal information also sail through easier.
The strength of the filter varies from provider to provider. Spam filtering today runs on machine learning models, and a larger training set means better accuracy. Gmail processes around 15 billion emails a day, while a smaller scale provider like Bigpond has a more limited data set.
Authentication enforcement also varies. A spam message that gets bounced by a larger email provider may make it through a smaller provider’s filter because of differences in strictness.
When your email provider’s filter fails, the unwanted email lands in your inbox and there’s no recourse except to report it and hope the filter updates in the meantime.
What a security suite does about spam email
Security suite products that provide email filtering work across a range of providers and clients, helping to nudge unwanted emails into a dedicated folder before they reach your inbox.
A security suite provides a second layer of email filtering that can catch anything your provider’s filter missed, and it provides direct control over the filter settings.
TrendLife
Trend Micro Antispam Toolbar is a part of Trend’s security suite products. It plugs into your desktop email client and filters out emails you don’t want to see. You can directly adjust the filter strength up and down and maintain a whitelist of senders you trust.
The Antispam Toolbar checks incoming email against Trend Micro’s database of spam patterns. A separate filter diverts any emails that carry dangerous links to limit exposure to unsafe websites.
Norton
Norton has moved away from a traditional spam filter, but the new Safe Email product connects to your email account and scans incoming messages, flagging each as safe or suspicious before you open it. It moves detected scam and malware emails into the Norton Suspicious folder, leaving your main inbox cleaner.
Norton Safe Email works on up to five email addresses at once. Since it functions in the cloud, it works across devices. Safe Email works with all major email providers including Bigpond.
Spam email: Our take
Spam filtering is an ongoing battle, but a security suite can help. The extra layer of filtering means explicit junk emails are less likely to hit your inbox, and any false positives just mean checking the spam folder occasionally.
Provider-side filtering is dependent on your email provider, and based on feedback we’ve received, Telstra is falling behind. While training the spam filter is good advice over the long term, it doesn’t fix the issue today.
If you’re on a paid Bigpond email account, you shouldn’t have to wade through spam email to retrieve the messages you actually need. Until Telstra improves, a security suite is a solid short-term solution.
For some long-term solutions and best practices, check out our guide on reducing spam here. If you’re wondering about the difference between unsubscribe and report as spam, check out our article here.
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