Handling spam is an increasingly present part of the email delivery process. To find out what spam is and how it is being detected and blocked, follow the article.
What are spam and spam filters?
Spam (or junk) mail is unwanted, irrelevant, usually commercial advertising or promotional material sent to a large number of recipients via email without their request.
Every email provider has dedicated filters to protect users from spam and abuse, but not all spam filters function the same way. Generally, spam filters use special algorithms to analyze an incoming email with multiple criteria to consider, including its similarity with emails you’d manually marked as spam earlier, common trigger words, content, and design of the email, and so on. Then the filters determine whether the email passes through to your inbox or stays in the spam folder.
How does Spark handle spam?
Currently, our app doesn’t have its own spam filters. When handling spam, Spark relies on your email provider's spam filter. So if your email provider flags an email as spam, Spark will too.
For instance, if you use a Gmail account, spam is managed by Gmail's algorithms and servers. If you use iCloud, it’s iCloud’s technology that detects and blocks junk mail. Spark syncs with your email provider server, but doesn’t affect the spam filters.
Another great way to handle spam in Spark is the Gatekeeper - you can learn more about the way it works in this article.
How to resolve the issue of spam not being filtered properly?
If your server doesn’t detect junk mail properly, we recommend creating your own spam filters. This can usually be done on your email provider's website or in a dedicated app, if there is one. For example, here is how to create a filter in Gmail.