In their efforts to do so, the duo were able to create a spam filter which successfully blocked 94 per cent of spam emails in an ethical and less intensive way.

 

The filter is able to block 80 per cent of spam emails which passes ISP blacklists and only mistakes 0.5 per cent of genuine emails as spam. It is also thought to be less demanding on the efforts of ISP and large enterprises when it comes to filtering out spam.

 

The news could be music to the ears of many professionals in email marketing, who may hope they don't have to work as hard to avoid being mistaken as spammers. Others will be hopeful that the introduction of the filter could lead to emptier inboxes and higher open rates of the emails which do make it.

 

In a statement cited by v3.co.uk, Menahem and Puzis explained why they were so keen to develop a new anti-spam algorithm.

 

"While content-based filtering [methods] are considered as the most accurate spam mitigation methods, they are also the most computationally intensive and sometimes considered as privacy infringing."

 

News of the new filter comes shortly after reports from theregister.co.uk suggested that email spam was dying down. Many experts in the field have noticed a number of spammers turning to social media websites instead of email.