Editing Anti-spam techniques (section)

{{Short description|Methods to prevent email spam}}
{{redirect|Spam blacklist|Wikipedia's spam control mechanism|Wikipedia:Spam blacklist|selfref=y}}
{{How-to |date=April 2024}}
Various '''anti-spam techniques''' are used to prevent [[email spam]] (unsolicited bulk email).

No technique is a complete solution to the spam problem, and each has [[trade-off]]s between incorrectly rejecting legitimate email ([[false positive]]s) as opposed to not rejecting all spam email ([[False positives and false negatives#False negative error|false negatives]]) – and the associated costs in time, effort, and cost of wrongfully obstructing good mail.<ref>{{Cite web|date=2016-09-07|title=10 Tips to Avoid Spam {{!}} Digital Security Guide {{!}} Safeonline.ng|url=https://www.safeonline.ng/|access-date=2021-12-21|website=Digital Security Guide {{!}} Safeonline.ng|language=en-US|archive-date=2022-05-18|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220518191517/https://safeonline.ng/|url-status=dead}}</ref>

Anti-spam techniques can be broken into four broad categories: those that require actions by individuals, those that can be automated by email administrators, those that can be automated by email senders and those employed by researchers and law enforcement officials.