4 Reasons You Should Consider a 3rd Party Mail Filter

Email is still one of the most used business apps, with employees spending an average of 28% of their day in their email program. It’s the preferred method of communication and is still used widely internally, despite the rise of messaging apps. However, email is also a major target for phishing, making it a big vulnerability for cybersecurity. If you don’t have proper protections in place to comb through emails and flag the dangerous ones, you could be open to cyber attacks. When 91% of cyber attacks start in an email, how do you keep users safe? One of the best ways to do this is using 3rd party mail filtering.

Mail filters act as an email sentry and analyze messages before they’re delivered to users. While most email programs will have a built-in “spam” or “junk” folder, they’re not typically equipped with a strong mail filtering program, which is why 3rd party solutions are important to consider.

Third-party mail filters will use behavior-based algorithms and AI to review incoming messages and sort them according to their type. As a result, it can red flag emails that look suspicious, always deliver emails on a “safe list,” and dramatically reduce the amount of spam that users have to sort through.

How Does Email Filtering Work?

Email filtering looks for multiple criteria in messages and is also trained to recognize wanted messages from unwanted emails.

Some of the criteria that email filters use to detect unwanted messages are:

• Common spam keywords, such as “earn money” or “free”
• The email domain in the “From” line of a message not matching the domain the email was actually sent from
• If the sender’s IP address has been previously flagged for spam
• Links or file attachments in a message that are detected as potentially malicious
• Emails from senders not in your contact list that contain suspicious links

Email filters will identify potential spam and phishing messages. They are then placed in a junk folder on the mail server, rather than going to the user’s inbox.

Mail administrators can then review those messages and decide to delete or to deliver.

What Are the Benefits of Using Mail Filtering?

Filtering Protects Your Business from Online Threats

One of the most important reasons to use a 3rd party mail filtering application is for IT security. With phishing emails being the main delivery method for all types of online attacks (ransomware, credential theft, cloud jacking, etc.), it’s important to stop those attacks at their source.

If you can keep a majority of phishing emails from ever getting to your users, you significantly decrease your risk of suffering a costly cyberattack.

Improves Productivity & Saves Time

Nearly 85% of all email is spam. Having to sort through spam increases the amount of time users are in their inboxes.

Users first have to read enough of the spam message to realize it’s spam, then delete it, and then empty their deleted items folder to completely get rid of it.

In many spam messages, those “unsubscribe” links aren’t legitimate. So, users not only spend time trying to unsubscribe, they may just be confirming to the spammer that this is a good email address to use.

Email filtering reduces the number of spam messages that employees need to deal with daily, improving productivity and reducing the time they spend going through incoming emails.

Saves Bandwidth

When email messages are coming in, it’s taking up your network bandwidth. If you have several spam messages coming in a day for an office full of employees, that could be a significant amount of network resources being used for junk mail.

Email filters can keep that junk mail from being delivered to users, so it’s not using up your bandwidth for messages that will end up being deleted as soon as they’re received.

Saves the Hard Drive Space

It doesn’t take long for a user’s inbox to become quite large. Sometimes mail programs can take up over 1GB of hard drive space by themselves!

Oftentimes, spam and phishing emails can contain large images that unknowingly take up more of a user’s hard drive space. They may have these large images to help disguise themselves as legitimate emails.

Users may not even realize that it’s the mail program causing them to run out of space on their PC. This can lead to lost time as users find files to delete to make a dent in storage space.

Filtering reduces the delivery of unwanted messages, which means less storage space taken up on your computer.

Get Help With Expert Mail Filtering Solutions

Copperband Technologies can help your southern Kentucky or Middle Tennessee business put a mail filtering solution in place that keeps your office more secure and more productive.

Contact us today to schedule a consultation! Call 931.263.8000 or email us.