Reasons why businesses should invest in spam filters

If your business uses email OR has an email account, chances are you’ve received spam emails at some point. These messages often contain unsolicited advertising or explicit content.

At best, spam only takes up a lot of space in your inbox. But at worst, it may contain malware that can infiltrate your systems and corrupt or steal your data.

To prevent spam from taking up email storage space and infecting your systems with malware, you need to use spam filters.

What are spam filters?

Spam filters are a type of software that keeps unsolicited emails away from your inbox. Not only do they keep your inbox less cluttered, but they also prevent your staff from downloading malicious attachments and opening fraudulent websites that are designed to steal visitors’ data. And since these filters take out unwanted emails automatically, they save you and your staff time and effort.

How do spam filters work?

While spam filters serve the same function, different types of filters work in different ways. Let’s take a brief look at each type:

• Content filters look at the words comprising an email to determine if it is spam or not. Spam tends to have the same objectives, such as offering discounts and promos, pointing to online porn and other explicit sites, or appealing to recipients’ fears, desires, and greed. These filters are usually triggered by terms related to money, such as “free investment” and “additional income.”
• Language filters block emails in languages other than the ones you permit. However, if you’re expecting business emails that are in another language, you’ll need to check your spam folder to find those messages.
• Blocklist filters keep your inbox free of email messages from addresses that have been listed as sources of spam. You need to update regular blocklist filters often since it’s easy to create new email addresses, though more advanced filters block IP addresses of spammers instead of addresses.
• Rule-based filters apply the conditional protocols you set to block emails. For example, you can create a rule to block emails from specific web domain addresses
• Bayesian filters learn what you often mark as spam and create rules. Once these rules are applied, incoming emails that possess similar features as those that have been blocked will be automatically flagged as spam.

While many email clients have built-in spam filters, consider using paid filters that offer more advanced and reliable spam protection. The best ones cost around $1 per user per month and give you the option to use add-ons for an extra fee.

Why pay for spam filters?

Let’s take a look at reasons why your business would need paid filters:

• Optimizable degree of security – Settings that are too weak may compromise your cybersecurity defenses, but settings that are too stringent may impede important sales, marketing, and operational communications. Paid spam filters prevent this problem by letting you customize settings according to your business requirements.
• Granularity – You may need different settings for different types of users. For example, spam filters for staff members who interact with clients and business partners must be stricter than those used by everyone else. Security standards may also differ across departments. For instance, your sales department may need looser protocols than the rest of the company so they can receive and respond to sales leads.

Did you know? Our email/spam protection service can take care of all of your email security needs for you.

• Control over how spam is treated – Top-notch filters grant you the ability to choose how spam is treated. For instance, you can choose to have spam quarantined first so that you can take a look at them, or you can have them deleted automatically after a certain amount of time has elapsed.
• Other features – You may also want extra functionalities, such as:
  • Outbound mail filtering – counters hackers who’d use your email addresses to send spam and phishing emails
  • Mail continuity service – allows you to continue to enjoy email services during mail server outages or network downtime

Email is a critical tool for conducting business, so you must do your best to protect it. [Company_short] can help you achieve that. Talk to our IT specialists today to learn more.