For many businesses, a hosted spam filter can be the best email filtering solution for protecting networks from phishing and email-borne threats such as malware and ransomware. Leveraging the economies of scale available in the cloud, a hosted spam filtering service delivers enterprise-class security at the fraction of the cost of an on-premises spam filter.
As software updates, patches and data security are all managed by the spam filtering service provider, a hosted spam filter has no maintenance overheads. Hosted spam filtering services are compatible with every type of operating system, are easy to scale up or down as required, and have expert client support available twenty-four hours a day.
Finding the Best Hosted Spam Filter
Several factors affect the effectiveness of a hosted spam filter. The number and type of mechanisms it uses to detect spam emails is often an important consideration, as are authentication methods, recipient verification types and sender policy frameworks. However what often makes a hosted spam filter the best hosted spam filter is its ease of use.
In order to be genuinely effective, a hosted spam filter must be simple to set up, the filtering parameters must be easy to apply, and it should be straightforward to apply additional rules to the filter in order to meet the unique requirements of each individual business. Without ease of use, gaps can be left in network defenses that allow spam email to pass through undetected.
A Key Filtering Mechanism is Greylisting
A key filtering mechanism in any spam filtering service is greylisting. The greylisting process returns all emails to their senders´ mail servers and asks for them to be resent. As spammers´ mail servers are often too busy to reply to a greylisting request, the spam email is never resent. In this way, spam filtering services with greylisting detect new sources of spam, as well as using SURBL filters to detect spam emails from known sources of spam.
The greylisting process can delay the receipt of an email by several minutes. Therefore services that use the greylisting process should also include a whitelisting feature. The whitelisting feature allows the email addresses of trusted senders to be added to a “whitelist” in order that their emails can bypass the greylisting process. This eliminates any delays in business-critical emails being received, while offering maximum protection against spam email from both new and known sources.
SpamTitan’s Hosted Spam Filtering Service
SpamTitan´s hosted spam filtering service is SpamTitan Cloud – a cloud-hosted service that takes seconds to implement by redirecting of your MX record. SpamTitan Cloud detects 99.97% of all spam email using a combination of Real Time Blacklists, multiple authentication methods and recipient verification types, and a sender policy framework that detects spoof emails – spam emails that fake their “from” addresses. Naturally, SpamTitan Cloud also includes greylisting and whitelisting.
All inbound and outbound email is scanned for malware by dual antivirus software. The purpose of scanning outbound email is to prevent your business´s IP address from being blacklisted if one of your email users has inadvertently downloaded a virus onto their desktop computer, or brought a virus to work from their malware-infested home computer. This feature not only helps identify malware that may already be present in your network, but also helps protect your professional reputation.
An Easy-to-Use Interface Puts You in Control
SpamTitan Cloud has been purposefully designed with ease-of-use as a primary consideration. System administrators will find our hosted spam filter has an intuitive user interface for the application of filtering parameters and filter rules. Acceptable spam thresholds are easy to adjust, and a comprehensive reporting suite helps administrators find the optimal settings for our spam filtering service in the shortest possible time.
Due to its ease-of-use, SpamTitan Cloud is a “set-and-forget” hosted spam filter. Once configured to the business´s unique requirements, system administrators only need to review the daily quarantine reports in order to identify any false positives (SpamTitan Cloud has a verified false positive rate of 0.03%) and any emails that have not been sent due to being considered unsafe by the outbound antivirus scanning process.
How SpamTitan Increases Spam Email Detection
All incoming emails must be assessed to determine whether they are genuine and should be delivered. The latest statistics from Statista suggest that more than 48% of all emails are spam. These unwanted and unsolicited messages need to be analyzed and categorized. Spam emails need to be rejected, and malicious emails must be accurately identified and blocked. SpamTitan achieves this by performing a wide range of checks on all incoming messages.
Office365 Anti-Spam Controls and SpamTitan Features Compared
Microsoft Office 365 has many security features, although many organizations find the default security offering fails to meet their expectations and many phishing messages are still delivered to end users’ inboxes. To significantly strengthen Office 365 security it is necessary to adopt a defense in depth strategy. By layering another email security solution on top of Office 365, organizations can greatly improve resilience to phishing attacks and malware threats.
In contrast to Office 365, SpamTitan uses predictive techniques to identify and block new threats such as zero-day attacks and new malware variants. All embedded hyperlinks in emails are compared with six specialist Real Time Blacklists to provide superior protection against phishing and spear phishing attacks. The email filter of SpamTitan uses SURBL filtering and malicious URL detection mechanisms to minimize the likelihood a malicious email avoiding detection, while twin anti-virus software engines ensure that 100% of known malware is blocked.
Take a Free Trial of our Spam Filtering Service
If you have concerns about spam email and the potential threat it presents to your business, you are invited to take a fourteen-day free trial of our cloud based anti spam service – SpamTitan Cloud. The free trial enables you to witness the ease of implementation, configuration and use, and allows more than enough time for system administrators to find the optimal settings for your business´s unique requirements.
To find out more about this opportunity, do not hesitate to contact us. Our team of Sales Technicians will be happy to explain more about our offer, guide you through the registration and implementation process, and be happy to answer any questions you have about our cloud-hosted spam filtering service. Please note, by taking advantage of our free trial offer, you are under no obligation to continue using our spam filtering service at the end of the trial, and no credit card details are required before you can access our hosted spam filter.
