False positives
untimely filtering of legitimate e-mails
Table of Contents
Definition: What is a false positive?
A false-positive email is a legitimate email that is marked as spam or rejected by spam filtering or security filters. False-positive emails can be annoying for users as they may miss important or urgent emails.
How does false-positive detection work?
False-positive email detection is carried out by spam or security filters that use algorithms to determine whether an email is legitimate or not. The algorithms use a variety of techniques to analyse the e-mail, including analysis of the e-mail header, analysis of the e-mail content and analysis of the sender’s behaviour.
The false positive rate is the percentage of legitimate e-mails wrongly identified as spam by anti-spam. False-positive and false-negative rates are measures of the quality of an antispam solution. The lower these rates are, the better the solution performs. However, these two rates always vary inversely.
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