Mailtraq > Features > Anti-Spam > Introduction IntroductionMailtraq and the battle against Spam
Most users would prefer not to receive any spam, but this is not a trivial responsibility for a mail administrator. Preventing spam is, in essence, deciding not to deliver some mail. With thousands of messages to filter, this is clearly not a manual task, yet if it is automated there is a risk that some spam will get through, and worse, that some desired email will be erroneously filtered out ('false-positives').
The task for the mail administrator is to devise a scheme which will filter out the maximum amount of spam, whilst minimising the false-positives. In an ideal world there would be a simple 'off-the-shelf' solution, preconfigured to do this. Unfortunately this isn't possible - for two reasons: everyone's idea of what should be filtered out is subtely different; and secondly, spam is a moving target, with the spammers continuously adapting their profiles to counteract the filtering techniques used by the mail administrators.
In this battle the key assets for the mail admin are flexibility, and a strong understanding of the tools at their disposal. Mailtraq is an extremely flexible tool in the battle against spam. This section describes the various strategies and facilities available to the Mailtraq admin.
| 
