Choosing an Anti Spam Solution

When you are choosing your anti spam solution it is a smart move to shop around and see what product will provide you with the best security for the amount of revenue you wish to invest.

For a good comparison of the available products you must gather lists of everything on the market and hold them up against each other. When you can see what each service is offering, and for what prices, you then need to take into account any specific needs that your organization may have due to the business it engages in. For example, an accountancy company may wish to add extra levels of encryption to keep financial data safe.

In order to help you make you decide this article will go through a number of the main things you should review when you decide to make the investment in an anti-spam solution. The main things to take into accounts are operational considerations, additional tools and simplicity

1. Operational Considerations: The majority of anti spam filters complete a process where they review inbound emails against lists of known spam broadcast emails using addresses and IP addresses. In addition to this a number of services will complete comparisons with Sender Policy Frameworks and SMTP Controls. By doing so the service is doing everything possible to stop spam email being sent to your servers from recognized sources. In relation to unknown sources of spam email, most services should be providing an option for greylisting where all inbound mails are asked to be resent to you. The reason for this is that spam servers normally have too much email traffic to spot an email like this immediately.
2. Additional Tools: You should see if the solution is hosted. Can it recognize spam in the body text of an email in the attached files? What are the reported detection rates and can they be proven by the maker? Are SURBL filters to provide protection against phishing emails included in what you are paying for?
3. Simplicity: You should only be paying for a solution that is easy to install, use and requires little manual maintenance. As most people are used to configuring cloud faced interfaces these days this makes things very easy to accomplish. If you have good Internet download speed then you will have the service up and running in minutes. Changing settings can be completed by anyone and easily. Most importantly updates are run automatically. This means that once new malicious domains are identified they are added to blacklists and accessing them or receiving an email from them, is no longer possible unless you whitelist it.

Billions of dollars are stolen annually by cybercriminals using spoofed emails and websites hosting malware. All that needs to happen is for one staff member to be careless in relation to incoming email and clicking on URLs and your organization could be hit with regulatory fines or, even worse, have money stolen directly from bank accounts.