Anti-Spam Service

Spam is, at best annoying, but at worst, it can be part of a malware infection that causes significant upheavals and results in high financial costs. Spam, or unsolicited emails, enter an employee’s inbox in droves: the amount of spam received by organizations varies, with reports coming in at around 45 to 73% of emails recorded as spam. A survey by Spam Laws found that over half of respondents saw spam as a “major problem.”

Spam causes productivity issues as employees wade through dozens of spam emails every day, looking for legitimate emails. But the dangers of malware are also exacerbated by spam; spam either carries malware or causes employees to become desensitized to malicious emails leading to accidental data exposure and subsequent malware infection.

Anti-spam service solutions, such as SpamTitan, provide a robust and effective way to filter spam before it enters your employee’s inbox. Here, TitanHQ checks out why anti-spam service is essential and how SpamTitan can provide a spam-free work environment.

Why is Anti-Spam Protection Important?

Email is a very busy communication channel; according to the Radicati Group, 333 billion emails were sent and received daily in 2022. This estimated number of daily emails is expected to be 392 billion by 2026, so email communications will continue to grow. Unfortunately, spam costs business money and time. A survey found that manual filtering and deleting spam can take an employee up to 80 hours a year. 

Spam is annoying but potentially malicious; the Radicati report also highlights that malware is a major email-borne threat for organizations of all sizes with complex, ‘blended attacks’ that use worms, and other self-propagating malware, often starting with spam email. Radicati suggests that anti-spam technology is ‘highly effective’ but is increasingly challenged by ‘graymail,’ a word that describes seemingly legitimate bulk emailing practices. This complex landscape of spam and graymail requires an intelligent approach utilizing multiple layers of email filters, including machine learning.

To protect an organization against the dangers of spam, an anti-spam service will:

• Prevent malware attacks.
• Stop inboxes from being cluttered by unwanted emails.
• Prevent email from being used for social engineering attacks and similar ruses that lead to exposed data.

What is an Anti-Spam Service?

Anti-spam can be delivered as-a-Service either using an anti-spam on-premise, Platform-as-a-Service, or via a managed service provider (MSP). Advanced anti-spam services apply layers of spam filtering techniques to ensure that spam capture is effective and holistic. Modern and advanced anti-spam services will typically employ artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify and filter spam emails, augmented by policies and rules. Typically, the anti-spam service will use the following process to stop spam from entering an employee’s inbox:

1. Spam enters a corporate email server.

2. The anti-spam service is pre-configured to use rules to check an email’s validity. Rules and policies can include:
     a.    Set specific email addresses or domain names that you want to allow or block.
     b.    Specific anti-spoofing settings.
     c.    Geoblocking settings allow you to block email based on geographic location.

3. Some advanced anti-spam services will use machine learning rules to learn and predict email patterns that represent spoof emails.

4. The checked email will be scored based on the filter results. If the email passes a pre-configured threshold, it will be quarantined.

An anti-spam service is cloud-based and runs as-a-Service. The configuration of this service, including policy and rule setup, is done using a centralized component, usually a central dashboard, that simplifies maintenance and updates.

Important Filter Types Used in Anti-Spam Services

Using multiple layers of dynamic anti-spam technology is crucial as threats evolve and spam content morphs to avoid static anti-spam filters. The following layers should be deployed as a minimum in any anti-spam service:

• Harvesting/Dictionary Attack Protection: Filters that look for specific words or content in an email and block/quarantine that email if those words are identified.
• Real-Time Blacklists (RBLs) and Graylists: Used as a baseline to identify and block spam from recognized spam-supporting ISPs.
• Whitelists (Safelisting): A global Whitelist page will allow control over which messages are always allowed.
• Bayesian Analysis: A self-learning system that continuously improves as it learns.
• Auto Learning: Use of AI and machine learning should be used to protect against cyber threats by using pattern detection in real-time.
• Heuristics: Detects viruses by examining code for suspicious properties.

Other Important Elements of an Anti-Spam Service

As-a-Service anti-spam solutions should also provide features to make the use of the service simple and fast:

• Easy to configure rules and policies.
• Easy to deploy across a corporate network and for remote workers.
• Deployment options that offer any sized company access to world-class anti-spam services.
• Centralized administration for policy and rule configuration, updates, and onboarding and offboarding.

SpamTitan Anti-Spam Service

SpamTitan is an anti-spam filter designed for any sized business or educational establishment that an MSP can deliver. SpamTitan uses layers of anti-spam filters to identify and block malicious and spam emails. Additionally, SpamTitan is designed to minimize the interruption of email flow, with machine learning being applied to make a super-fast analysis of the likelihood that an email meets the criteria to be classified as a spam email.

The SpamTitan combination of multi-layered analysis, authentication, anti-virus protection, safelisting, and blacklisting, ensures that emails are thoroughly checked before releasing to an employee’s inbox.

The effective email protection and spam-blocking capability of SpamTitan are vital for organizations to help protect against spam, ransomware, malware, and links to malicious websites.

Features of SpamTitan Anti-Spam Service

• 99.99% catch rate for spam, viruses, malware, and other email threats; 0.003% false positive rate
• Anti-Spam Engine provides centralized control of anti-spam policies and permissions.
• Cloud-based, easy to deploy, administer, and update.
• Unobtrusive to end users, it prevents accidents and human error.
• Advanced reporting provides valuable insight into email security data; reports are comprehensive, providing at-a-glance views, making them ideal for presentation to senior management.
• Provides email protection, blocking over 99.9% of spam, viruses, malware, and other email threats.
• Offers a flexible solution suitable for both small and big businesses.
• SpamTitan is easy to set up, simple to configure, and up and running in minutes.
• A central web console uses privileged access control for users for secure spam filter management.
• Updates can be fully automated and pushed out to end-user devices, including remote workers.
• Supports existing identity systems and robust authentication, including dynamic and aliases file recipient verification and SASL authentication.
• Supports local language.
• SpamTitan is a true service, with no hardware or endpoint software required, and is also operating system agnostic.

 

SpamTitan Comprehensive Spam Filtering

As well as the baseline filters used by anti-spam services, SpamTItan also uses the following smart filter layers to dive deep into potential spam emails:

Heuristic Filter: Heuristic spam filters typically use intelligent technologies such as machine learning algorithms to identify spam. The system uses scoring to apply policies to incoming and outgoing emails. If an email meets the score, it will be set as spam and blocked. Heuristic filters are reactive to changing scenarios and phishing tactics. 

Collaborative Spam Fingerprint Checks: Can use “community intelligence” to build up a database of spam ‘fingerprints’ that can be fed back into the spam filter to block spam messages.

RBL Tests (Real-Time Blackhole List): checks for known spam IP addresses and updates filters as new spoof sites appear.

SURBL Tests: detects websites that are known to appear in spam emails.

Overall, SpamTitan provides 360-degree protection to deal with the onslaught of spam every organization must deal with.

 

If you’d like to stop 99.99% of spam emails from landing in your employees’ inboxes, check out the SpamTitan anti-spam service free demo.