Retarus E-Mail Security customers have long been given the option of either marking legitimate mass-emails for immediate delivery or choosing to send them straight to quarantine by way of precaution.
Historically, we had simply been calling all such legitimate mass email transmissions “newsletters”. But for about a year we are using the more accurate term “graymail” instead, as such messages often occupy the gray zone between wanted, consciously subscribed contents and unrequested spam. For instance, newsletters on topics in which one has lost interest over time or over-eager notifications from carrier networks – the list is endless.
According to Wikipedia, such messages can easily account for more than 80 percent of the average email inbox. Technically, it is very challenging to distinguish accurately between a newsletter and spam – in large part because the respective pain thresholds, beyond which recipients may find themselves bothered by a certain message, can vary greatly between different users.
In our experience, a pleasant side effect of the Graymail quarantine is that it sometimes filters out even more unwanted advertising than the dedicated spam filter. This applies in particular to spam mails that contain typical features of a newsletter, such as a unsubscribe link. For this reason, Retarus e-mail security administrators should give the newsletter quarantine a try (if they are not already using it anyway). Your users will be grateful if they are even less bothered with unwanted advertising in this way.
