Stop SPAM with Managed Email Content Filtering

Posted by admin on Mar 17, 2011 in Email Content Filtering | 1 comment

Over 80% of all email traversing the internet is categorised as SPAM. That is a lot of excess internet load on your business and a lot of staff productivity lost in dealing with the influx of this useless email.

Imagine, every day each of your staff members or work colleagues sits down at their PC to see 30, 40 or even more new emails in their inbox. After 15 to 30 minutes or even more has passed and they have finally sorted through all the emails to discovery they only have 4 or 5 legitimate new emails.

Now think about roaming users with access to their email on mobile phones, PDA’s, iPads and laptops. All those new spam emails have been distributed to multiple devices per user. This is also only considering the emails that are received through the night. SPAM email is delivered 24×7, so you and your staff have to periodically deal with this painful email throughout the day too.

That is a whole lot of daily productivity loss, which turns the daily chore of dealing with SPAM from a nuisance to a very costly exercise. There are many ways of preventing spam email, but there aren’t many solutions that actually work.

Desktop software or Endpoint solutions – cannot deal with spam mail until it has been received by your email client software. These solutions normally only quarantine the mail into a spam folder where the end user is still required to manually delete the quarantined mail. Although endpoint spam software is not all that expensive (per seat), it can equate to an expensive solution when licensing is purchased for each desktop PC and laptop in the organisation. This solution does not eliminate the load on your network and also adds additional load on the desktop PC or Laptop. Desktop solutions don’t really save any end user time either, as your staff still have to manually deal with the quarantined emails.

Onsite server solutions – are marginally better than endpoint solutions as they do stop the spam emails from reaching the end users. These solutions require you to have your own onsite mail server, such as Microsoft Exchange, so for a lot of smaller organisations an onsite server solution is not applicable. This solution, being onsite, does not eliminate excess internet and network load due to the spam traffic. It also adds additional load and overhead to your mail server. An onsite server solution also requires additional IT support and maintenance to keep the software up to date, functioning and protecting against the most current email threats.

Onsite gateway appliances – are the pick of the bunch, when it comes to your own onsite solution, although these appliances are very expensive and cost prohibitive for most organisations. They also require your business to have internal mail servers and infrastructure. Like the above solutions, all the spam email is processed onsite, so no network load is eliminated from your network or internet connection. This solution, although it eliminates the overhead from your mail servers, it still requires quite a lot of upkeep and maintenance from IT support staff.

Managed Email Content Filtering Services – are the ideal solution if you want to stop SPAM before it reaches your network and users. A managed email content filtering service is scalable from one user to hundreds or even thousands of users per organisation unlike all the previously mentioned solutions. Being a managed service the content filtering gateway is kept up to date, maintained and you are ensured of the best spam and email security protection at no additional support cost to your business. Being a hosted offsite solution there is no load on your internal IT infrastructure at all, as all the email processing is taken care of on your managed service provider’s datacentre infrastructure.

Managed email content filtering services such as AUS-IP’s SecurMail are also provided at no upfront hardware, software or infrastructure cost. These services are also charged at a monthly rate and you are only charged for the amount of users or mailboxes utilising the service, making a service such as SecurMail a very cost effective solution. Services such as this, offer many more fully inclusive additional features over and above just SPAM protection and prevention.

Such email content filtering features include:

• anti-virus and malware protection
• file attachment type filtering
• image analysis for pornographic material
• email archiving
• email encryption
• inbound and outbound email filtering
• disclaimer stamping
• SMS notifications
• and the list goes on

The selection of an anti-spam solution for your business should be pretty straight forward. SPAM is not only a time waster it is expensive and putting up with the influx of such email is just costing your organisation more and more daily. Don’t spend a fortune on implementing your own infrastructure. Use a Managed Email Content Filtering System and stop SPAM in its tracks.