How to Distinguish a Reliable Spam Filtering Service
Management has finally decided to make your life easier and move the spam filtering process to a service provider. Before choosing a spam filtering service provider for the organization, know how to tell the difference between a good spam filtering service and one you can’t rely on; here are some points you need to look out for:
Spam filtering is not the only thing you want. Your spam filtering service shouldn’t stop at just spam email. Rule out any service that doesn’t also filter for malware and phishing messages. Look for the solutions that use multiple technologies including filters, lists, reputation services, multiple scan engines, and that let you create your own whitelists and blacklists.
Outbound email is just as important as inbound email. Users make mistakes, and landing on a single blacklist can take weeks to sort out. Sending a single infected message to a customer can result in C-level awareness, cost business, and generally ruin your day. And it only takes one marketer CC-ing (instead of BCC-ing) a list of your top 1,000 customers to land on everyone’s blocked domain list. Only look at vendors that can filter both your outbound and inbound messages.
User self-service is a very good thing Look for solutions that can send users individual reports, with links they can click on to release any false-positives themselves, so you don’t have to deal with spam or blocked messages.
Logging and reporting are critical. You want to make sure that when you do have to find out what happened, you can do so quickly and easily. Look for logging, reporting, and make sure your spam filtering service has good search tools too. You want to be able to search on sender, recipient, domain, subject, date/time ranges, etc., and generate reports, not just screen shots.
Consider archiving while you’re at it. If you’re not archiving yet, you will be, and the top spam filtering services also offer archiving; selecting a service provider now that offers email archiving can save you from having to do this whole exercise next year.
With this short list of must-have features for your spam filtering service, you will be able to narrow the field in no time and know what degree of service the company is investing in.
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.
Mata description:
An outline of what features a reliable spam filtering service for businesses must include.
Keywords:
Spam filtering service, spam filtering, spam, malware, phishing, outbound email, user self-service, reporting, logging.
