8 Features Your Spam Filtering Service Must Include
When it comes to selecting the best spam filtering service for your business, there are several critical features your chosen vendor must offer for you to get the best value for money and the maximum protection for your users. In this post I outline the eight features your spam filtering service must have. If your current spam filtering service offers all of these features, you have a keeper. If it doesn’t, throw it back in the lake and give it some time to grow; there’s bigger fish out there and you want a champion.
1. Scans inbound and outbound mail
You want to protect your users from spam, malware, phishing attacks, and all the rest of the junk that comes hurtling towards their inboxes. You need to protect your customers, vendors, and business partners from anything that might get past your antivirus software and user training programs. Scanning your outbound mail does that by blocking infected attachments, messages with key words, or anything that looks like spam.
2. Blocks more than just spam
Spam filtering is critical, but it isn’t the only thing you need to block. You want a solution that blocks virus infected attachments, messages with malicious scripts, phishing attacks, denial of service attacks, and directory harvesting attacks too. If it doesn’t do all of those, it’s not the spam filtering service for you.
3. Works with all platforms
Any solution that limits itself to a single email platform is too limiting for you. You want to select the spam filtering service that works with whatever type of messaging solution you use. Whether you upgrade or migrate to another product entirely, your spam filtering solution should continue to work with it.
4. Has logging and reporting
Knowledge is power, and nothing makes management feel more powerful than reports. Joking aside, you want to make sure your spam filtering solution can easily provide you with any data you need about inbound and outbound messages. It should be easy to search and easy to generate reports for when you get those requests to go figure out what happened.
5. Offers per user quarantine
Searching for a blocked message is hard enough when you are looking at your own junk mail folder. Remember how much fun it is to wade through thousands of spam messages looking for that one? If the spam filtering solution you are looking at has one giant quarantine instead of per-user storage, it’s not the product for you.
6. No agent software to install
This one is simple. If you have to install any kind of software on your users’ workstations, it’s not a solution you want to consider.
7. There’s user self-service
You are constantly being asked to do more, with less, and the time in your day is already overbooked. Anything you can offload back to your users is time saved, and the best spam filtering solutions offer individual user report emails that have links each user can click themselves to release a false positive. Users can get instant results, and you don’t have to chase tickets all day long about “missing messages”.
8. Is multilingual
Business is global, and even if your company is only focused locally today, the Internet isn’t. Spam filtering solutions that offer multilingual support are not only easier for your non-native English speaking users to work with, they’re probably better at identifying spam in other languages too.
There you have it; eight features your spam filtering service must have. As you consider vendors, use this as a checklist to eliminate the ones that aren’t worth your time, from the real offerings that will solve your email problems today.
This guest post was provided by Casper Manes on behalf of GFI Software Ltd. GFI is a leading software developer that provides a single source for network administrators to address their network security, content security and messaging needs. Learn more about the benefits of using a good spam filtering service.
All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Photo source: https://www.sxc.hu/photo/1055089
