The popularity of hosted email security has continued to grow in popularity as companies choose to implement the high level of security its features provide, resulting in better spam detection rates and the near elimination of virus-infected emails being registered on the company network.
These are low maintenance spam prevention solutions with many advantages including:
- Updates being carried out automatically by the
- Universal compatibility with all operating systems
- Infinitely scalable and cost-effective
- No hardware purchases or software installations required
- Support in place directly from the service provider
Greylisting & Hosted Email Security Solutions
Not every hosted email security software is identical. The majority employ Real Time Blacklists and SURBL filters to prevent emails from recognized sources of spam, those with higher spam detection rates use a process known as greylisting to assist in spotting emails from previously unknown senders of spam emails. Greylisting can slow the sending of emails to users, but the benefits can be massive.
Reports have indicated that the average spam recognition rate for the top ten email filtering services that do not use greylisting is just 96.86%. Even with this high spam detection rate, the average office worker will be sent an average of twelve spam emails on a daily basis. In contrast to this, hosted email security software with greylisting has been proven to detect around 99% of received spam email – cutting the amount of spam emails registered a daily average of four.
The amount of time spent during a working day by just one office-based worker in spotting and removing eight spam email messages each day may not appear to be very much however when you apply this to a company that has a workforce of thousands then you can quickly see how, during a 12-month period, a company can stop a lot of potential productivity being lost. Along with this the number of potential malware and spam threats entering the mail network will be cut by up to 67% for little investment.
Hosted Email Security Operations
In order to block spam email attacks businesses establish an account with a hosted email security provider, share domain and domain administration details and then integrate with the service provider;s thanks to an MX record redirect. Once this is completed every inbound emails will have to go through the service provider’s servers where it will be checked and reviewed to ensure that it complies with the policies put in place by the domain administrator.
The user policies are shared using existing directory tools and it is possible to make changes whenever this is required. Domain administrators can set varying levels of acceptable spam thresholds according to user, user group, domain or company-wide using the centralized management interface (a default threshold is put in place until this process is completed), and schedule reports to be shared to all users when email is quarantined by the hosted email security software.
Following this, domain administrators can simply review the amount of spam emails being identified, tagged, quarantined and removed in real time using the management dashboard or historically through a range of customizable reports. These reports can assist companies with auditing their online security and completing risk assessments if the business operates within a regulated sector.
