Benefits of a Professional Email Filtering Service

Email Filtering provides protection against spam and email-borne threats, but there are significant benefits of implementing a professional email filtering service. Professional email filtering services have additional mechanisms to reduce the volume of spam email that avoids detection, anti-virus software to identify threats contained within emails, and outbound scanning to prevent your organization´s IP address being incorrectly regarded as a source of spam.

These elements of an email filtering service help to increase productivity, mitigate the risks from phishing and malware, and save your organization the headache of being removed from a global blacklist. Studies have demonstrated that an organization with six hundred employees loses more than 130 days a year if each employee receives five spam emails per day, while phishing campaigns are acknowledged to be responsible for more than 90% of all data breaches.

What a Professional Email Filtering Service Does Differently

All email filters use front-end tests to eliminate spam from known sources. These tests usually consist of comparisons against global blacklists, the validation of Sender Policy Frameworks, and Bayesian analysis to identify attempts to circumnavigate the spam filter settings. Once the front-end tests are conducted, most email clients will then forward inbound emails to the recipients´ inboxes. What a professional email filtering service does differently is re-inspect the emails.

Professional email filtering services use a variety of mechanisms in the re-inspection process, but one of the most effective is greylisting. Greylisting temporarily rejects any email from a sender the email filter does not recognize and asks for it to be resent by the sender´s mail server. Usually this is not a problem. The request is acknowledged, the email resent, and the sender´s IP added to a whitelist to prevent any delays in the delivery of future emails.

However, when the email has originated from a previously unknown source of spam (i.e. one that does not appear on a global blacklist), the request goes unanswered. This is because the bulk email tools used by spammers do not queue and reattempt mail delivery as regular mail servers do. Consequently, the greylisting process detects spam that would otherwise have been allowed through, and identifies previously unknown sources of spam to add to the global blacklists.

Phishing campaigns are acknowledged to be responsible for more than 90% of all data breaches.

How Does Email Filtering Protect an Organization?

Email filtering is an essential tool that is used to protect a business from several email-borne harms. SpamTitan provides the following capabilities to prevent negative productivity caused by spam and to secure the data, login credentials, and IT infrastructure of an organization:

Anti-Spam

Spam is a nuisance and can carry malicious content and attachments. Email filtering stops spam emails from clogging up employee inboxes and prevents malware infections. 

Anti-Phishing

Phishing is behind 90% of data breaches. Therefore, inbound emails are filtered to prevent phishing emails from entering the corporate network. This minimizes the risk of human-centered cyber-attacks, which lead to 82% of all data breaches.

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Outbound Filtering

Outbound emails also require filtering to ensure company data protection policies are followed. Outbound filtering also ensures your company does not inadvertently send spam emails or pass on malicious content.  

Productivity

Employees can lose up to 80 hours a year by manually removing spam emails and weeding through spam to find legitimate messages. An email filtering service will automatically stop spam from entering an employee's inbox, freeing employees to deal with legitimate emails.

Sandboxing greatly increases the detection rate of elusive threats in the pre-execution stage, including APTs, targeted attacks, evasion techniques, obfuscated malware, custom malware, and ransomware.

Email Filtering Services and Regulatory Compliance 

Organizations must adhere to a raft of email-related regulations that cover specific industry requirements and data protection laws. For example, regulations such as CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and HIPAA require email protection to prevent data loss and spam; non-compliance can lead to severe penalties. SpamTitan is designed to provide the email filtering techniques needed to comply with email security and data protection regulations and laws. 

Email Filtering Techniques

Email filtering services use multiple layers of email filtering techniques to stop spam and malicious emails from entering the corporate network and employees’ inboxes. These layers can be adjusted using the email filtering administration console to reflect company policies and regulatory compliance requirements. Typical techniques used to filter email include the following:

Blocklists and Real-time Blackhole List (RBL): known lists of spammers and phishing domains are used to create blocklists. A Real-time Blackhole List (RBL) contains the details of spam and phishing domains and is used to check incoming emails. If the inbound email is from any of these known lists, it will be filtered and quarantined before removal.

Safelisting: in contrast to the RBL, safelists offer an organization a way to set up known and legitimate email senders.

Greylisting: this is a type of temporary blocklisting. The organization can temporarily reject an email if a sender is not recognized, quarantining the email for inspection. If the mail is found to be legitimate, the email will be automatically sent on to the recipient.

Content and Code Analysis: some email filters, including SpamTitan, will use deep code and email content analysis to detect malware and malicious URL links. 

Heuristic Filter: the complex nature of spam and malicious emails means that intelligent technologies such as machine learning algorithms are now used to filter emails. SpamTitan uses Heuristic filters to score incoming and outgoing emails for filtering. One of the benefits of Heuristic filters is that they quickly adapt to changes in the phishing and spam landscape. 

Collaborative Spam Fingerprint: a large cohort of millions of users helps build a database of spam 'fingerprints' that informs the SpamTitan spam filter which emails are likely to be spam or phishing. 

Why Choose SpamTitan as an Email Filtering Service

There are certain features and functions that an email filtering service should provide for your organization. SpamTitan has been designed to go beyond the most basic features offered by many intrinsic email filters. SpamTitan provides the following to ensure that your choice of SpamTitan results in effective email filtering:

The Importance of Email Anti-Virus Protection

Most organizations already have anti-virus software installed to protect their systems and networks from malware. However, most anti-virus software acts retrospectively by detecting malware once it has been installed. The anti-virus protection incorporated into an email filtering service detects security risks within the content of emails and their attachments, preventing the delivery of any infected emails so that they cannot be opened and the malware installed.

The anti-virus mechanisms also look for phishing emails and ones containing malicious URLs. These threats to online security are becoming more complex and, in 2016 Q1, it was reported that 93% of all reported phishing emails contained encryption ransomware. By blocking the passage of these malicious emails, an email filtering service helps to protect your organization´s network from data breaches, system-wide infections and ransomware.

One further role conducted by the anti-virus mechanisms of an email filtering service is the scanning of outbound mail. Although it may seem unlikely that any employee within your organization would dispatch an email containing a virus, the possibility exists that a file prepared on an infected home computer could be attached to an outbound email. Outbound scanning prevents the scenario in which your organization´s IP address is considered a source of spam or malicious software and blacklisted.

SpamTitan from TitanHQ - Professional Email Filtering Solutions

SpamTitan from TitanHQ is a multilayered spam email filter that has won thirty-six consecutive VB Bulletin anti-spam awards for its high rates of spam detection and anti-virus protection. Using a sophisticated re-inspection process that includes greylisting, SpamTitan blocks 99.97% of spam email, has a 100% malware detection rate, scans outbound mail, and ensures email continuity in the event of downtime or a server outage.

SpamTitan from TitanHQ is easy to set up and configure via an intuitive browser-based console. Monitoring features and reporting options can be adjusted to suit your organization´s specific requirements and - depending your preference for on-premise or cloud-based solutions 

SpamTitan Cloud is a versatile email filtering solution, built using the same technology as SpamTitan Gateway but hosted in the cloud. With no hardware or software required, SpamTitan Cloud is fully compatible with all operating systems and supports multiple domains and an unlimited number of users.

TitanHQ solutions are suitable for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) who will find that SpamTitan Cloud provides unmatched email security for your customers. Our email filtering service will protect your network from rogue or hacked customers, and both solutions have an extensive API set for integration with third-party management products. Both are also available in white label format for rebranding and reselling.

Try Our Email Filtering Service for Free

The cost of failing to implement professional email filtering solutions can be considerable. The 2015 report - “The Cost of Phishing & Value of Employee Training” - estimated that the average cost to an organization of removing malware and recovering data was $1.8 million. By comparison, the cost of a professional email filtering service is typically less than $10.00 per employee per year.

To find out more about our offer, simply give us a call. One of our team of Sales Technicians will be happy to answer any questions you have about email filtering services, review your existing configuration and make recommendations. Once the most appropriate SpamTitan solution has been selected, it only takes minutes to install our professional email filtering service so that your organization can start benefitting from high rates of spam detection and anti-virus protection today.