pattern scanning

A very popular form of detecting spam that attempts to categorise a message based on the content of the message. This approach relies on a complete database of words and phrases that may be used in spam. This highlights a major flaw: the phrases to scan for won't be known until spam has been received. It is generally up to you to add new phrases into the configuration and not only is that a waste of your time, but unless you are a spam expert, you may not add the most appropriate phrases. Thus, with this approach, you risk detecting real emails that contain any of the phrases listed.