Comparison of Hosted Anti Spam Solutions
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Conducting a comparison of hosted anti-spam solutions helps ensure your business implements the most effective barriers to spam email and email-borne threats. Unfortunately, conducting a comparison is not a simple process. Many email service providers will claim that theirs is the best anti-spam software because of features they have included in their detection mechanisms.
However, many fail to include features in their software that maximize spam detection, that identify email-borne threats and that scan outbound mail. Each of these factors is important if you want to create a virtually spam-free email environment, protect against phishing attempts, and ensure your IP address is not accidently blacklisted for distributing spam.
Prior to conducting a comparison of hosted anti-spam solutions, it is advisable to understand how most anti-spam solutions work. Email service providers such as AOL, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all have anti-spam mechanisms in their services that check inbound emails against blacklists of known spammers, Sender Policy Frameworks and SMTP Controls.
These mechanisms are good for identifying spam from known sources. They typically block up to 97% of spam or higher depending on whether they are using Bayesian Analysis to calculate the likelihood of an email containing spam based on its content. Filter settings can also be adjusted by the user to increase the volume of emails that are blocked, but this often results in what are called “false positives” - genuine emails being incorrectly identified as spam.
In businesses with a small volume of email traffic, a spam detection rate of 97% is acceptable. However, for most businesses, the 3% of spam that remains undetected can be a problem - not only in terms of productivity loss but also because of the increased risk that malware is allowed to enter the business´s network. For this reason, many businesses look for “Greylisting” when conducting a comparison of hosted anti-spam solutions.
Greylisting is a process that blocks every inbound email and asks for it to be resent. As spammers´ servers are too busy sending out new spam emails, the request to resend is ignored. When the blocked email is not received a second time, the greylisting process tags the original email as spam and it is quarantined. In this way spam from previously unknown sources is identified as well as spam from known sources, and virtually all spam email is eliminated.
It was mentioned above that some hosted anti-spam solutions fail to identify email-borne threats or scan outbound email. To put that into context, all email filters have some level of antivirus protection; but, in order to provide maximum defense against phishing campaigns and malware downloads, the ideal hosted anti-spam solution should have phishing protection and malicious URL detection.
Outbound scanning is important because IP addresses can be blocked due to outbound mail being identified as spam. This could be a genuine error caused by an over-zealous Bayesian Analysis, or it could be because somebody within your organization is surreptitiously sending spam email using your IP address. An outbound mail filter will ensure any emails that could possibly be identified as spam or containing a virus are quarantined and reported for manual checking.
If you are going to conduct a comparison of hosted anti-spam solutions, SpamTitan from TitanHQ is the solution against which you should compare the alternatives. SpamTitan runs the same front end tests as conducted by anti-spam solutions offered by email service providers, but also uses Bayesian Analysis and Greylisting to achieve a verified spam detection rate of 99.97%, with a low false positive rate of just 0.03%.
Dual antivirus protection is provided by Bitdefender and ClamAV to protect against phishing attempts and malicious URLs, while SpamTitan not only scans outbound mail for potential spam and viruses but also ensures email continuity in the event of downtime due to a natural disaster or server outage. Despite all these features, SpamTitan is remarkably easy to use and only takes a few minutes to get up and running.
Other reasons for considering SpamTitan in a comparison of hosted anti-spam solutions include:
We believe that SpamTitan is the benchmark against which all other anti-spam solutions should be compared. If you would intend conducting a comparison of hosted anti-spam solutions, we invite you to try SpamTitan for free. Our offer includes full technical and customer support, and there is no obligation to continue with the service once the trial period is over.
