Email is a powerful communication tool for many individuals and businesses! However, your email containing business sensitive, personal, confidential information is prone to many security threats, etc. if you do not use proper security tools such as spam filters that infiltrate your inbox, and spy on your data.

You may receive emails suggesting products that you may have browsed on an online store or may have used matching keywords in your emails, instant messages, etc., emails that try to stoke your emotions requesting you to donate generously to a charity or emails that lure you saying you won a million dollars on a lottery. All such emails try to elicit some confidential information from you or just require you to click on the email, open attachments, etc.

The volumes of unsolicited marketing, promotional email that floods your inbox may seem more like unprofessional approach of businesses trying to sell you some random stuff, that may be partly true, but in some cases, such emails carry the threat of virus such as spyware, malware and so on. When you click on any such emails, open an attachment falling for its catchy title you may be unlocking the inviting such virus to reside on your computer, exposing the sensitive data to hackers.

Spam whether it is the frustrating and less harmful unsolicited marketing emails or more the dangerous virus carrying email costs your business heavily. Apart from the loss of productive hours in cleaning up the inbox, the loss of data results in loss of business opportunities, loss of credibility, lawsuits and more. Spam spells disaster for any business. Spam filtering solutions are great tools that help restrict the entry of such emails in your inbox and thereby offer mental peace so you can concentrate on tasks that are more productive.

With 50% of an estimated 270 billion emails sent classified as spam, spam-filtering solutions market is a goldmine for security system providers. As such there are many email filtering solutions that have flooded the market recently, selecting the right email filter for your requirements is a challenge.

The increasing sophistication of the hackers requires using a quality Email filtering software for your business. In spite of the best efforts, about 2% – 3% of the spam still infiltrates your organization’s computer network, and it takes just one click to clog the entire network and cause maximum damage. It is, therefore, very important to consider the percentage of spam blockage by a particular solution before subscribing to a particular anti-spam solution.

When considering anti-spam solutions, you need to make sure that the solution demonstrates high levels of virus protection. Some of the factors that you need to take into account include:

• The options available for the treatment of email identified as spam is an important consideration. What options does the email filter offer you? Some of the options that such software offers include, quarantine, delete, or deliver.

• Does the solution offer protection against potential malware threats? If so, what is the quality of such protection?

• Evaluate the results of the front end tests conducted to show the effectiveness of such filtering.

• The percentage of false detection, i.e. number of genuine emails that the anti-spam blocks in error.

• The options available in case of false detection, unblocking the senders.

• Other value added options provided such as email continuity and recovery services in the event of a disaster or outage, etc.

Once you have verified the success rate of spam blocking, the options available for the treatment of spam mail you need to verify that the anti-spam has certain essential features.

• Outbound Mail scanning: Outbound mail scanning, becomes essential to avoid a spam label against your domain. It may happen in the event an employee works on a file from his home computer and reopens it on your organization’s network infecting the network with the virus, which might result in labelling your domain as spam. Blacklisting your domain will affect the flow of communication to your organization.

• Blocking phishing or malicious websites: One of the biggest threat online today is phishing, wherein the hackers try to steal your confidential data. When a user visits a website accidentally and divulges the login credentials, breach of data security happens and is the common practice of hackers; therefore, anti-spam software should effectively block such phishing, malicious URLs so no user can visit such sites.

When you decide to invest in a spam filtering solution, make sure you have verified the spam protection rate and have made sure that the software has all the basic features of spam filtering.