What is the Hosted Email Security Process?

Hosted email security is most often a cloud-based email filtering service provided by an established online security company. The reason why many businesses choose to use hosted email security software is to take advantage of its advanced features in order to increase spam detection rates and limit the number of phishing emails entering the network, as well as those harboring malware and ransomware.

Cloud-based email filtering services are low maintenance solutions, with software updates being performed by the company providing the service. They also have the advantages of being universally compatible with every operating system, infinitely scalable and cost-effective – requiring no hardware purchases or software installations, and being supported by the service provider´s technical team.

The Hosted Email Security Process Steps

  1. Company agrees to provision of service with vendor, account is created
  2. Network managers add their domain and specify domain administrator with hosted solution
  3. Network managers redirect MX records to the service provider’s servers.
  4. User policies are created/imported from existing directory tools
  5. All inbound emails traffic is filtered using the parameter put in place previously by the network manager.
  6. Network manager reviews ongoing reports in relation to spam traffic and can amend the spam thresholds as he/she sees fit.

Thanks to this process it is a straightforward process for network managers to successfully manage the integrity of the company emails servers and keep all data or private information safe. It will also be possible for individual users and managers to request that certains senders, domains and IP addresses are marked as safe so they are not subjected to the filtering process or create a delay for business critical emails.

How Does Greylisting Work?

The strongest of email filters use Real Time Blacklists and SURBL filters to block emails from known sources of spam in the process detailed above. This can be further enhanced by using a solution known as greylisting. It works as follows:

  1. Emails lands on inbound servers
  2. Email is sent back to the originating mail server with a request to be resent. The aim of this is to spot unrecognized sources of spam. Busy spam email servers will not spot the request for the email to be resent.
  3. Emails messages are resent a second time and subjected to SUBURL and Real Time Blacklists in order to double check for any email that may have been sent a second time by a hacker

This process has been proven to achieve a spam detection rate of around 99%, compared to less than 97% for hosted email solutions that do not include it.