Sunday, January 29, 2012

The Connection Between False Positives and Email Security

By Jennifer Flowers


Many businesses lose a lot more money than they realise as a result of false positives. When a potential client's email goes into your spam folder instead of your inbox, you miss out on the chance to sell that customer something. Obviously, it is important for businesses to ensure that this does not happen.

Some business owners do not consider false positives a problem for their business. They figure that this happens so rarely that it really is not much of a problem. However, false positives are a far bigger problem than most people realise. A false positive rate of just 2% means that for every 1,000 emails you receive 20 of them get lost in your spam folders. In other words, hundreds or thousands every day. This means you are ticking off a lot of your customers every week.

Not only are emails from potential customers affected by false positives. It is also a problem for internal emails sent between colleagues. The kind of information that gets missed because of this includes flight information, meeting times and project updates. When these kinds of emails are not seen by the people they are meant for important tasks do not get done.

A lot of time is wasted due to false positives. Once employees realise that the problem exists they take steps to address the problem. They end up skimming through their spam folder in an effort to find these stray emails. Having to do this takes up a huge amount of their time and is frustrating.

By buying the right email security service, you can considerably reduce the occurrence of false positives. Every email security system has at least rudimentary spam filters built in. However, sometimes the cause of high levels of false positives is these very same spam filters. For this reason it is important to buy email security software or services that allow you to adjust your spam filters to reduce false positives.

By buying the correct email security system you can improve productivity and avoid letting your customers down. Because around three fourths of all email that is sent is spam not having your spam filter switched on is not an option. You really have to be able to tweak your spam filters to avoid false positives.




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