The Importance of a Microsoft 365 Spam Filter
Susan Morrow
Anyone who uses email knows that spam is an incredibly huge nuisance. However, it’s not just a nuisance and inconvenience anymore. It’s now a costly issue for businesses, and it can lead to a data breach if spam emails persuade users to access malicious websites in their browsers on business devices. Spam filtering in Microsoft 365 is not as difficult as you think provided that you have an effective and cost-efficient way to implement it across your network environment.
Did You Know?
SpamTitan's spam catch rate
a ransomware attack occurs
the average cost to manage spam per person without an email filter
of all email is spam
The Danger of Spam Emails to Business Operations
Spam costs businesses money in several ways. The first one is the amount of spam sent to various inboxes costs money to store. Billions of spam messages go out every day. Forbes reported in 2020 that 320 billion spam messages go out every day, and that number continues to increase yearly.
With effective email services, emails are blocked from accessing recipient inboxes. Microsoft 365 users are large targets because they are usually inboxes for businesses. When a spam message (or any message for that matter) reaches a target recipient’s inbox, the server must store these messages in its storage reservoirs. Now imagine that billions of email message are sent every day, and you can conclude that storing these messages are expensive. If just a fraction of these messages reach your business email server, you pay the cost of storing them. Because spam messages are a nuisance, you pay the cost of storing nuisance messages.
Nuisance isn’t the only danger of allowing email messages to reach your user inboxes. Another issue is the contents of these messages. Users must spend business hours reading them, and then many of the messages contain malicious links. They are not necessarily phishing email messages, but they contain links to illicit websites that could affect the security of the user’s device or the business network.
Aggregate the time it takes for users to read spam messages and the time it takes for administrators to manage them (e.g., blocking them or instructing users on what to do with spam messages), the business loses money on what could be described as an unnecessary nuisance and potential security issue.
“The Cost of Phishing & Value of Employee Training” – an average organization will be forced to spend $1.8 million every year on malware removal and data recovery."
What You Need to Protect Microsoft 365 User Inboxes
A Microsoft 365 spam filter is necessary to stop messages that could cost the business unnecessarily and protect data. Some businesses decide to focus on employee education, but this leaves the business open to human error, insider threats, and bypasses of security protocols.
Microsoft 365 has its own built-in spam blocking features, but they are ineffective at stopping sophisticated campaigns targeting enterprise businesses. For example, the Office 365 spam filter has a real-time blocklist, but it’s reactive based on customer reports. A solution such as SpamTitan is proactive at blocking based on artificial intelligence (AI) and heuristics on common behaviour patterns.
Spam messages often contain malicious URLs, which could fall into phishing. It takes sophisticated technology to proactively detect these malicious URLs rather than rely on users to report them. SpamTitan Plus has the technology and AI-driven features to block spam emails from ever reaching the user’s inbox. It contains a predictive analysis of email content to fully protect users from accidentally clicking malicious URLs and putting it on untrained individuals to properly identify a malicious message from a harmless one.
Benefits of Using an Effective Microsoft Office 365 Spam Filtering Tool
Using the SpamTitan Plus email filtering tool, you lower cybersecurity risks for phishing attacks and reduce the size of inboxes, essentially lowering your network storage costs. It also helps with the analysis of incoming and outgoing messages and provides administrators with the information needed to review email activities.
SpamTitan works in both an on-premises environment and cloud-based email servers. For MSPs, it means that you can roll out necessary email security for all customers and manage their policies from a single location. It also helps MSPs determine if their customers are targets of sophisticated spam and phishing campaigns so that the MSP can alert business employees to be on the lookout for malicious messages should one slip through.
Malicious messages are quarantined, so administrators and MSPs can also review messages to reconfigure policies should they find a false positive. Although SpamTitan has few false positives, policies might need to be changed to ensure that false positives are limited and legitimate messages always reach the intended recipient.
With SpamTitan, MSPs and local administrators can deploy an effective solution to manage email and stop malicious messages at an affordable price. We have advanced phishing protection, so you can eliminate human error from the risks of a data breach.
Susan Morrow
- DATA PROTECTION
- EMAIL PHISING
- EMAIL SECURITY
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