Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Why Managing False Positives Is Important

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.

Sadly, not all business owners realise just how big a problem false positives are for their businesses. They believe that their firm experiences relatively few false positives, so it is not something that needs managing. However, it happens more than 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. This means you are ticking off a lot of potential 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. These kinds of emails are vital and if they are not actioned because the person they were meant for did not see it, the consequences can be serious.

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.

Luckily, you can reduce email false positives using some email security systems. All email security systems have some sort of spam filters built in, but it is these filter that cause many of the false positives. 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 choosing the email security service you buy carefully, you can improve productivity and never miss a lead. Because around three fourths of all email that is sent is spam not having a spam filter on is not an option. However, you have to be able to tweak your spam filters if you need to.




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