Outbound Spam Filtering Has A Significant Role To Play In Reducing The Spread Of Spam Email Messages

What Is Outbound Spam Filtering?

We have seen that people tend to care for the inbound spam. However, outbound spam is equally crucial. Your incoming spam is an outbound spam for someone in the system. Therefore, service providers should pay enough attention to the spam emails exiting their network. If you look at it, the root problem of inbound spam lies in outbound spam. Hence, outbound spam filtering can reduce the spread of spam messages considerably.

Thus, we define outbound spam filtering as a way of identifying and blocking spam emails at the source and prevent it from clogging the servers.

What Will Happen If You Leave Outbound Spam Unchecked?

If left unchecked, outbound spam can result in the blocking of service provider’s network by the rest of the internet. Ultimately, it will lead to the blocking of legitimate email traffic, as well for all its customers. Blocking outbound spam is one way of ensuring that inbound spam does not clog email inboxes all over the internet.

Sophisticated security systems are available that can track the source of spam and determine the amount of spam coming from a specific IP address. If it senses abnormal spam traffic from a particular IP address, these security systems could go ahead and blacklist them. Therefore, outbound spam filtering addresses this challenge admirably by blocking outbound spam and ensuring that your network remains functional.

How Does Outbound Spam Filtering Work?

Mail servers identify the source of emails using their IP address. Email receivers also depend on the IP address to identify responsible senders. It is so because multiple users can send emails through a single email server. Secondly, hackers are adept at faking email addresses or even impersonating genuine email senders.

Therefore, installing an outbound spam protection on your network can help users identify the individual users based on the authorization credentials. The outbound spam filters can track individual users and identify spam behavior user-wise and prevent such emails from leaking out of the email server’s IP address. It also protects the mail server from becoming blacklisted, thereby ensuring that the legitimate email sent from your IP address finds its rightful recipient.

The responsibility of an outbound spam filter does not end with analyzing email message content and blocking spam. It extends into identifying the original sender of each outbound message and record the behavior of the senders while scouting for suspicious patterns of user behavior.

Outbound Spam Office 365 – An Example Of A Sound Outbound Spam Filter

One of the best outbound spam filtering software is Outbound Spam Office 365. This software uses advanced spam filtering techniques to check every outbound email for spam message characteristics and ensure to block them at the source. It also checks the reputation of the sender before allowing the message to pass through it. It also creates a list of IP addresses that tend to send spam emails and block them, thereby creating a block list. Office 365 users can use the connection filtering facility available in the software system to improve the quality of emails they send through their email servers.

Outbound Spam Filtering Open Source – The Need Of The Hour

One question on everyone’s mind would be how to choose the ideal outbound spam filtering solution. We shall discuss some points to note when selecting the outbound spam filtering software for your email servers.

• The best solutions are those that provide transparent proxying capability while dealing with VPS and dedicated hosting machines.
• Outbound spam can render inbound spam volume inconsequential. Therefore, it should have the ability to scale depending on the situation.
• An outbound spam filtering open source solution should be an ideal one because you can modify the system according to your needs at any time. You will also be able to manage it centrally.
• Check out whether your outbound spam filtering service has robust analytics. It will help administrators to monitor the behavior of senders and review the delivery results.
• Your vendor should specialize in IP reputation management by attending industry conferences and maintaining relationships with blacklist operators and large email receivers alike.
• Your solution should notify you immediately if there has been a compromise attempt.
• Apart from handling well-known spam campaigns, your solution should be able to identify potential spam campaigns, as well.

Outbound SMTP Proxy

Since email servers use SMTP relay service to deliver emails, your outbound spam filtering solution should follow the below steps before delivering the email to the intended recipient.

• Identify the original sender of the email.
• Scan the email using high-quality filtering software to identify phishing content and act accordingly.
• Use the internal reputation system to verify the sender’s reputation.
• Check whether any of the email recipients are spam traps.
• Verify the sender’s email domain for any attempts to impersonate genuine email senders.

The Outbound SMTP Proxy filtering service rejects the email if any of the steps mentioned above indicates a problematic situation. In case everything is fine, the service ensures to deliver the email to the intended recipient.

Final Words

It is always advisable to go to the root of any problem to solve it. Yes, spam emails can be irritating. An outbound spam filtering service is ideal for blocking the spam emails at the starting point itself. It can go on to reduce the inbound spam emails to a considerable extent.