Ensure Spam Free Emailing Environment With Office 365 Spam Filter

Working Of o360 Filter

The o365 spam filter provides the user with proper protection against unwanted spam by working as follows

• The assignment of spam confidence level (SCL) for every inbound as well as outbound e-mail decides whether an e-mail is spam.
• By running the e-mail against SCL, if the message looks like spam, it gets directed towards the junk e-mail folder of the user.
• After outbound e-mail analysis, if SCL indicates that a particular e-mail is an outbound spam Office 365, then it gets routed towards the high-risk delivery pool, or it can get restricted from delivering.
• When the e-mail delivery gets restricted, then the sender receives a notification, known as Delivery Status Notification (DSN), which says that a particular e-mail couldn’t get sent.

Customization Options in Office 365 Spam Filter

Every organization has its own needs regarding the working of the spam filter, and hence, o365 spam filter offers the feature of customization of anti-spam setting, which includes

• Management of policies regarding content filters. The user can easily edit the default settings of the content filter and customize it as per the organization’s needs.
• The customized content filter policies can be applied to specific users or groups or various domains as per the wish of the user.
• Custom policies get preference over the default policies, but there is an option to change the priority or the running order of the customs policies.
• The content filter setting allows the user to choose the action for e-mails that get identified as spam.
• The user can even choose to filter the e-mails if they are written in a precise specific language, or are sent from a particular country or region.
• Organizations can apply a content filtering option only to the inbound e-mails and not to outbound messages.

Filtering of Outbound Spam Office 365

Outbound spam filtering is done by Office 365 to keep a check that the user’s server does not send spam. There can be chances that the user’s system gets infected by malicious software, which sends spam e-mails from the user’s computer. Users cannot turn off the Outbound filtering feature but change its configuration in ‘configure the outbound spam policy‘ settings.

Connection Filtering and Creation Of Office 365 Spam Filter Whitelist

Under connection filtering, Office 365 checks and verifies the reputation of the sender of an e-mail and allows its entry in the mailbox of the user. The user can create an Office 365 spam filter whitelist to enable the e-mails sent from some specific IP addresses to enter the inbox. They can also create the blacklist of IP addresses, to restrict the entry of e-mails sent from a particular IP address.

Office 365 Spam Filter Advanced Options

For organizations that seek an aggressive approach towards the filtering of spam, there are Office 365 spam filter advanced options available. They can tweak the Advanced Spam Filter (ASF) settings in the spam filter policies. Thus, admins can mark messages as spam whenever they suspect that a message contains malicious content by looking at the message properties. ASF targets the common spam properties in the e-mails explicitly. There are two markings for the ASF detections: Spam, and High Confidence Spam.

Office 365 Spam Filter Best Practices

Spam filtering is one way of prevention of spam, but there are other options offered by Office 365 to protect the user from spam. Here are some Office 365 spam filter best practices

Mail Flow Rules

To go one step ahead of the default spam filtering, mail flow rules, also known as transparent rules, can be used to customize the spam confidence level value and set it as per the organization’s criterion for spamming and create a more safe defense wall against e-mail spam.

E-mail Authentication

E-mail Authentication is a technique under which the use of Domain Name System (DNS) is done to include some correct information inside the e-mail, about the sender of the e-mail, which helps the receiver to identify that a genuine entity sends an e-mail or not. Following are some of the e-mail authentication techniques which can be used by the Office 365 admins for advanced protection against spam:

E-mail Authentication Through Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

The validation of an e-mail is done through SPF, as its origin is verified by matching it against the IP address of the sender and the alleged owner of the domain from which the e-mail is sent.

E-mail Identification Through DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)

By using DKIM, a digital signature is attached to the e-mail in the message header. The positive effect of this is that the receiver e-mail system can check and verify the e-mail signature of the e-mail sent by your domain to determine whether the received e-mail has come from a legitimate source or not.

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC)

For additional support to your e-mail partners, DMARC is another helping hand. It helps the recipient mail systems to determine the further steps to be followed if the SPF, as well as DKIM checks, are failed.

Getting rid of spam from their inboxes becomes all the more critical for business owners because it can carry malware, which can compromise the organization’s security and data. Hence, they must deploy the advanced features of Office 365 spam filter for high-end protection against spam.