A Brief Guide On Importance Of Using Email Spam Filters & How They Work

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For most of us, when we think of spam, the first thing that comes to mind is that these are junk mails sent by advertisers who may want to sell some pyramid scheme or any such product. However, that is far from today’s scenario. Spam comprises all the unsolicited and irrelevant emails that flood the user’s mailbox in a precise sense. Malicious actors send spams in bulk, hoping that unsuspecting users will open these emails. Employees constitute the prime target for these malicious actors.

A robust email spam filter can go a long way in keeping these malicious actors away from an employee’s mailbox, which works by screening the messages before allowing them to enter the inbox. These spam filtering solutions or processes that businesses apply to the email system imply a set of protocols and constraints that determine whether the incoming messages are spam or useful, and are the need of today, especially for SMEs that can’t afford to spend a fortune on adopting complex cybersecurity measures.

Table of Contents

What Is Email Spam Filter?

An Email Spam filter is a set of programs or code that helps detect the unwanted and unsolicited email while preventing those messages from entering the user’s inbox. It employs sophisticated tools like the Bayesian filters or heuristic filters to identify the spam through suspicious patterns of word or frequency of words. Businesses want to avoid spam at all costs, and hence, spam filters become necessary for the smooth functioning of email communication within the organization as well as outside communication with clients and customers.

How Does An Email Spam Filter Work?

An email spam filtering solution uses a particular set of protocols for determining which of the incoming messages are spam. The different types of filters that it utilizes are

Header Filters: They review and filter the heading or the message content’s subject line to search for falsified information.
Content Filters: The content filters help filter the message content of the email and, thus, confirm the presence or absence of spam.
Rules-based Filters: This filter functions as per the user-defined criteria that check or inspect the address of the specific senders or a particular word in the subject line or the message’s body.
General-blacklist Filters: This filter’s function is to prevent all the emails coming from a blacklisted sender.
Permission Filters: This filter functions in a specific way that would require anyone to send a message that needs to be pre-approved by the recipient.

The Need to Stay Extra Vigilant

Spam costs businesses billions of dollars around the world every year. When hit by malware through spams, organizations have to

Allocate additional resources to recover and secure the compromised employee and customer data.
Pay legal and forensic penalties to the regulatory bodies and dissatisfied customers.
Incur additional cybersecurity costs to restore systems, prevent further damage, and prevent future attacks.

Since the organizations face sophisticated email-based attacks for illegally accessing the confidential information, they need to deploy a reliable and effective anti-spam solution or spam filters.

With so many options available, it can be difficult to choose the right email service provider that offers the best enterprise spam filter with anti spam controls, user-friendly software, and other features for SMBs.

Here are the categories of spam filtering users must know about before making an informed decision.

Essential Categories Of Spam Filtering For Organizations

To prevent spam‘s repercussions, organizations need to deploy effective online spam filtering solutions in their networks. They can choose from these categories of solutions

Hardware-based spam filters: In this solution, the user needs to purchase a device installed on-site in the mail servers. Therefore all the email traffic would pass through the machine, thus blocking the spam effectively.
Software-based spam filters: The software-based solution is quite common and requires installing an anti spam software or process in the mail server for the filtration of the spam.
Cloud-based spam filters: In the cloud spam filter, the inbound spam filtering occurs in the cloud. With this solution, the mail exchange record gets pointed to the public or private cloud of the service provider. For small enterprises, cloud spam filter pricing can prove to be a much affordable option. The public cloud deployments are most suitable, whereas private cloud deployment is a better option for managed service providers and large-sized enterprises.

Apart from the antispam cloud solutions, a hybrid solution is also available that reduces the volume of the messages that regularly arrive in the organization’s mail server.

When it comes to email and data security, it is not merely a matter of installing an email spam filter, especially for enterprises. While it may offer robust protection against email-based threats, organizations need to deploy a comprehensive strategy that varies according to their needs and situations.

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