Cloud Based Spam Filtering - Email Filtering Solutions In The Cloud

What Is Cloud Based Spam Filtering?

Spam or unwanted email floods employees' inboxes daily. Spam costs productivity as employees grapple with hundreds of illegitimate emails in their inboxes. Spam is sometimes associated with phishing, leading to data breaches, the loss of privileged credentials, and a damaged reputation. Cloud-based email spam filtering solutions offer a cost-effective way to stop spam and phishing from turning inboxes into war zones.

What Happens If Spam Emails Are Left Unfiltered?

Spam emails have blighted worker productivity since the advent of computing. The Internet Society suggests that the first-ever spam email was sent to users of the nascent Internet known as “ARPANET”. This first spam email, innocuous by today’s standards, contained an unsolicited ad for a presentation by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

Since then, the number of both legitimate and illegitimate emails dropping into inboxes worldwide is staggering. In 2026, a report predicts that daily emails sent and received will reach 392.5 billion. In 2027, the daily number of emails is expected to reach 408.2 billion. Email as a medium is going nowhere, and the same is true for spam. The report also found that almost all (96.8%) of people receive spam messages.

These spam emails clutter an employee’s inbox when the company lacks a spam filtering solution. Spam emails not only cost time as employees wade through them to find legitimate emails, but they can also serve as a conduit for a cyberattack!

Email clutter

If employees are forced to deal with too many emails, many of which are spam, they can quickly become demotivated, and productivity issues follow from lost time and disgruntled employees. Employees need to be able to focus on legitimate emails, not wade through spam emails. Burnout is a real problem in the modern business world. According to Kaspersky, employees can waste up to 80 hours per year just sorting out spam.

Wading through illegitimate spam to find legitimate emails takes up more time, adding to employee frustration and reduced productivity. An overloaded email inbox, stuffed with pointless spam, can even cause health issues among workers, according to several studies.

Phishing emails

Phishing is the #1 method used to breach data and IT systems. Phishing and spear-phishing, along with social engineering, can be extremely difficult for even security-trained staff to spot. The results of phishing are legendary. A study found that 65% of social engineering attacks were phishing.

Phishing emails are successful. AI-assisted phishing is even more successful. A study found a 19-28% click-through rate for human-created emails, whereas AI-generated emails have a 30-44% success rate. Phishing is often used to steal login credentials. Once login credentials are in the hands of a cybercriminal, they are used to circumvent corporate network protections, leading to malware infections, such as ransomware.

The answer to the spam and phishing email problem is to block illegitimate emails at the source using cloud email filtering solutions.

We recently held a webinar with Osterman Research demonstrating how to reduce the risk of phishing and ransomware. Download the guide here to maximize your organization's email protection.

Why are Cloud Email Filtering Solutions Important?

Cloud email spam filtering solutions offer a flexible, affordable, scalable, and accessible way to prevent spam and phishing from entering employees' inboxes. Cloud email filters provide first-class email filtering for any size organization, from an SMB to an enterprise.

When a company chooses a cloud-based spam filter, such as SpamTitan, it deploys email protection across its entire extended network, including all internet-connected endpoints. Because the spam filter is hosted in the cloud, there is no capital expense, and the protection is automatically updated, ensuring that even new threats are prevented.

By using a cloud email filtering solution, a company actively chooses to scale flexibly across an increasingly diverse endpoint portfolio. In an era when employees are likely to work remotely, at least part-time, the flexibility and reach offered by cloud spam filtering is essential.

Spam email fraudsters use every trick at their disposal to circumvent protective measures. A cloud-based email filtering solution provides the agility to adjust settings and automatically update endpoints, ensuring robust, always-on email protection.

What are the Benefits of Cloud Spam Filtering?

There are various benefits to protecting email using a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, such as cloud spam filtering. The main benefits are as follows:

Multi-layers of email protection

SpamTitan cloud email filtering uses the same multi-layered approach to protect emails as physical device-based email filters.

The multiple layers of protection are as follows:

• Harvesting/dictionary attack protection
• Collaborative spam fingerprint checks
• RBL tests (real-time blackhole list)
• Bayesian analysis
• Rule-based spam scoring
• Allow and block list filters

Using these multiple layers of protection, emails are scanned to detect signals that identify spam, malware, zero-day threats, and other advanced threats, including AI-assisted threats and potential ransomware attacks. Any suspicious emails are stopped before they reach an employee’s inbox. SpamTitan utilizes machine learning to ensure that both known and emerging threats are prevented.

Centralized, easy administration

SpamTitan is a cloud-based spam filtering solution. Cloud-based spam filters are based on centralized administration. This means that updates can be quickly and easily pushed out from a central console to all connected devices across the expanded corporate network. Automated updates are a key tactic for mitigating the impact of emerging threats.

Easy deployment

Cloud email filtering solutions differ from virtual or physical appliances, as the filtering mechanisms operate in the cloud. This makes cloud-based solutions easy to deploy and configure. By making a small change to a mail exchanger (MX) record, the redirection of inbound and outbound emails through the service provider’s server is optimized.

Minimal maintenance and little overhead

Cloud-based spam filters are deployed as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. This means that your spam filtering service is hosted on your behalf and, therefore, available on demand. Your company then has minimal maintenance overhead and requires no capital investment; the managed service hosting the email filter on your behalf is responsible for this overhead.

Support for granular and local policies

Hosted in the cloud does not mean that a company must lose control of its policies. Deploying a cloud-based email filtering solution, such as SpamTitan, enables businesses to retain full control over their email filtering policies. SpamTitan allows your business to apply policies on an individual user, user group, or business-wide basis through integration with directory services such as AD.

SpamTitan supports multiple domains and is therefore suitable for businesses of all sizes, as well as Managed Service Providers (MSPs). Our cloud-based email security solution includes multilayered anti-spam analysis, including Sender Policy Framework (SPF), SURBL’s, RBL’s, Bayesian analysis, and more.

Administration of our cloud-based email security solution is straightforward. Once implemented via a redirection of the MX record, domain administrators can apply acceptable spam thresholds by user, user group, or domain – using LDAP and Active Directory if necessary - to accelerate the process. Real-time activity on the mail server can then be monitored via a web-based management portal, which can also be used to schedule reports in order to identify new threats and conduct risk assessments. Being a cloud-based solution, SpamTitan is compatible with all operating systems and is infinitely scalable.

• Easy to set up, simple to configure, up and running in minutes
• Low maintenance overhead
• Fully automated updating – you always get the most up-to-date cutting-edge security
• Web interface that allows easy access and visibility
• LDAP, Dynamic, and aliases file recipient verification
• SASL authentication
• No Hardware Required

As well as providing a cloud-hosted service, SpamTitan offers a Gateway on-premises spam filtering service that can be installed seamlessly into a physical or virtual infrastructure. A cluster option is also available, along with the possibility for SpamTitan’s hosted spam filtering software to be hosted in a private cloud – an ideal solution for MSP.

SpamTitan is an advanced and highly effective spam filter service, with a market leading 99.99% Spam Catch Rate with a 0.003% false positive.

What Are The Risks Of Not Having Cloud-Based Email Filtering?

Many businesses may choose to take the risk of spam emails, rather than deploy a spam filter. This choice, however, can lead to several problems:

Spam overload: As mentioned above, the spam tsunami is no fiction. Almost everyone receives spam. In the workplace, this leads to email fatigue.

Loss of productivity: Email fatigue reduces productivity. Employees become tired of wading through emails trying to tease out the legitimate from the illegitimate.

Missed emails: Important emails can become lost in a sea of spam.

Cyberattacks: Spam is not always just an annoyance; it can often be part of a social engineering and/or phishing scam. Spam can result in stolen credentials, which in turn lead to cyberattacks and data breaches.

Financial losses: In addition to the potential for financial losses from data breaches and ransomware, simply storing unwanted emails can consume bandwidth and storage.

Cloud Email Filtering Optimizes Productivity

The volume of spam and phishing is out of control, but cloud spam filters protect email and give companies of all sizes back control. By using a cloud email filtering solution, a business can control both inbound and outbound emails cost-effectively. The employee inbox is then no longer an attack surface but a productive work area.

Looking for an email spam filtering solution for your organization? Sign up for SpamTitan's Free 14-Day Trial.