Anti-spam systems often block the delivery of legitimate email. When this happens, the blocked message is referred to as a "false-positive" result.
As it turns out, stopping Spam is not nearly as difficult as avoiding false-positives results. Eliminating false-positives is the most difficult problem for email recognition and filtering technologies, and is what separates the OnlyMyEmail system from the rest.
Every spam filtering system or technique will create false-positives, and especially with regards to automated notifications, mass-mailed commercial newsletters and "legitimate" direct marketing. This is unavoidable simply because these systems seldom verify that the addresses they're sending to are legitimate, or that the recipients specifically requested such promotional emails in the first place.
The real measure of performance and accuracy when it comes to blocking legitimate email is the "critical false-positive" which can be loosely defined as the blocking of human to human correspondence. Few users really care if a newsletter is delayed or deleted by their spam filtering, as long as such instances can be easily corrected. On the other hand, the delay or deletion of personal or business communication can often have significant negative consequences, such as missed appointments, lost opportunities or damaged relationships.
In most comparative analysis, a critical false-positive rate of under 1% is usually considered to be exceptionally good. But, even as a "best case scenario" imagine the business consequences that would result from blocking even one out of every hundred emails from legitimate prospects, customers and clients, let alone the ramifications of blocking even more - as most systems will.
By contrast, OnlyMyEmail's technology was developed specifically to address the "critical false-positive" problem, and this is one of the benefits that distinguishes our service from other available solutions. In fact, OnlyMyEmail's critical false-positive rate is currently less than 10 per million emails. Importantly, this is not a "lab result" but is measured from our real-world production environment for clients who have been using our system for at least 14 days.
Further, in many of these cases, the false-positive was caused by having a friend forward an actual spam email to our user, or by purchasing products from known spammers (yes, this does happen). Even then, while these conditions may cause such emails to be blocked by our system, users can easily retrieve these emails and can also instruct OnlyMyEmail to allow future emails from the sender at the same time.
