Spam Filter Service

What is a Spam Filter Service?

A significant increase in spam emails is threatening email servers and affecting staff productivity in organizations worldwide.

As more spam enters an organization’s network, staff are ultimately spending more time dealing with unwanted emails rather than more important areas.

Not only is spam a nuisance and a distraction, but it also serves as a security threat – emails are the main method used by cyber-criminals to penetrate an organization’s network.

To protect against spam and phishing/malware more organizations are choosing a spam filter service - which can effectively block spam and malicious emails before they reach an organization’s email server.

However not all spam filters are the same - the best spam filter services are up-to-date, informed by the latest threat intelligence and continually refined to detect and prevent more spam messages from reaching an organization’s network.

Do I need a Spam Filter Service?

Although basic spam filtering exists on most email platforms, they don’t have the intelligence to recognise many of today’s cyber-attacks which are increasingly becoming more sophisticated in nature. As a result a powerful spam filter service is necessary to fully protect users and data.

The main spam filter services scan both inbound email and outbound email for spam, malware, suspicious links and attachments. Outbound scanning ensures emails inadvertently containing malware are not being sent from within an organization if an employee’s account has been compromised.

How does a Spam Filter Service work?

The main spam filter services – such as SpamTitan – stand out from the basic filters by incorporating advanced predictive techniques and dual antivirus engines to detect email borne-threats. Each incoming message is subjected to a series of checks to identify whether they contain spam/malware and must pass these checks to be successfully delivered.

Bayesian Analysis allows organizations to block an email based on its content or attachments. Content filtering identifies email message text often associated with phishing attacks, and previous sources of malware are automatically blocked. Bayesian analysis learns from each message scanned – the more messages it scans the greater its effectiveness.

Outside of the most common email-borne threats such as spam and phishing/malware, email impersonation attacks – where the email is spoofed to appear as if it is sent from an authentic trusted address, i.e. the CEO of an organization - are also on the rise. Employees are often fooled by these scams.

To block email impersonation attacks email authentication techniques such as Sender Policy Framework (SPF), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) are used to determine whether the sender of an email is authorized to send messages from that domain.

However the most effective way for organizations to prevent employees clicking on malicious links or attachments is to add cyber security awareness training to their security stack. This allows organizations identify the most at risk employees/departments so training can be tailored accordingly.

What makes the Best Spam Filter Service?

While naturally the most important element of a spam filter service is achieving the highest possible spam detection rate, other factors such as ease of use and individual features are what set apart the best solutions.

The following are the most common features of the main spam filter services, such as SpamTitan:

• Outbound Email scanning: Cyber-criminals are increasingly finding means of compromising business email accounts and using them to send bulk spam and malware. Outbound scanning prevents malicious emails from being inadvertently sent from within an organization. This prevents loss of credibility/reputation, as well as the organizations’ IP address from potentially being blacklisted.
• Greylisting returns every email to its sender asking for it to be resent. This prevents previously unknown sources of spam/malware (i.e. not recorded on real time blacklists) from entering an organization’s network. Spammers´ mail servers are too busy sending out further bulk spam emails to respond to resend requests.
• Sandboxing provides a powerful environment to run in-depth, sophisticated analysis of unknown or suspicious programs and files.
• Zero Day Attack protection anticipates new attacks using predictive technology.
• Advanced Threat protection scans all inbound mails with double anti-virus protection.
• Data Leak Prevention to prevent internal data loss.

SpamTitan Spam Filter Service

SpamTitan is an advanced and highly effective spam filter service, using double anti-virus protection and the latest threat intelligence to scan all inbound and outbound email, with a market leading 99.99% Spam Catch Rate with a 0.003% false positive.

SpamTitan enhances staff productivity, protects against known and previously unknown email threats and prevents loss of data, reputation, and credibility.

Organizations can easily apply filtering policies by user, user-group or business-wide.

Interested in trying SpamTitan for free?