In order to evaluate the merits of any product it can be beneficial to compare it against alternate products, and conducting a hosted anti spam comparison can ensure your organization implements the most effective filter for eliminating spam and web-borne malware. However, with so many spam filtering products on the market, a comparison of hosted spam filters is not always straightforward.
We have compiled a brief guide to the main factors organizations should consider in a hosted anti spam comparison. It is not an exhaustive list, but it will narrow down the field so that a comparison of hosted spam filters can be carried out on a smaller selection of products. This should help organizations select the most appropriate solution for their requirements.
Primary Considerations in a Hosted Anti Spam Comparison
The primary considerations in a hosted anti spam comparison fall into three categories – how the spam filter works, what other functions the spam filter provides, and its ease-of-use. Ease-of-use is important because if you have to dedicate significant IT resources to configuring and updating the spam filter, it is not going to be cost effective. As far as the other two categories are concerned:
How the Spam Filter Works
Most spam filters compare incoming email against blacklists of known spammers and their IP addresses. Many will also conduct checks against Sender Policy Frameworks and SMTP Controls. These are tried and tested methods of successfully detecting spam from “known” sources, but they fail to catch spam from new sources – which is why so much spam gets through email services such as Microsoft Office.
If your organization wishes to eliminate spam from previously unknown sources, a hosted anti spam comparison should include only filters that have an optional Greylisting feature. Greylisting is a “front-end” mechanism that returns all incoming emails to their originating servers with a request to send them again.
Requests to resend emails are usually ignored by spammers´ servers because they are too busy sending out fresh spam emails to respond. This means that the majority of traffic being returned to the email filter is genuine – although it will still go through the remaining tests to ensure it is from an authentic source and is malware-free.
What Other Functions the Spam Filter Should Provide
Hosted anti spam filters do more than detect spam. Many also detect malware contained within the content of an email or its attachment. How the antivirus software does this – and its effectiveness of detecting email-borne threats – should also be a consideration in a hosted anti spam comparison, as should the inclusion of SURBL filters to provide protection against phishing emails.
The threat from phishing emails and malicious URLs within emails cannot be understated. It only takes one employee to divulge their username and password or click on a malicious link for a breach of confidential data to take place or a network to be infected with malware. Phishing protection and malicious URL detection help avoid these scenarios and enhance your online security profile.
Spam filters with outbound email scanning also help to protect the reputation of your IP address. This function checks all outbound emails for content that could be interpreted as spam so that your organization´s emails are not blocked by an over-zealous filter and your organization´s IP address added to a global blacklist. The filters also check for malware that might have been inadvertently introduced by an employee – for example if they had prepared a file on a malware-infected home computer.
A Comparison of Hosted Spam Filters should Include SpamTitan Cloud
Any hosted anti spam comparison should include SpamTitan Cloud – a robust and effective filter for eliminating spam and email-borne malware. SpamTitan Cloud uses Bayesian Analysis and Greylisting to achieve a verified spam detection rate of 99.97%, and scans all outbound emails to protect your online credibility. Our hosted spam filter has a low false positive rate of just 0.03%.
Antivirus software with phishing protection and malicious URL detection is provided by top-rated Bitdefender and ClamAV, and our hosted spam filter ensures email continuity in the event of downtime due to a natural disaster or server outage. Naturally, SpamTitan Cloud is easy to use, with a browser-based console allowing network administrators to customize configuration settings and select from the multiple reporting options.
Other considerations you may want to take into account in a comparison of hosted spam filters include:
- SpamTitan Cloud is compatible with every operating system.
- There is no limit to the number of domains or users it can support.
- A choice of hosting options are available for organizations and MSPs.
- SpamTitan Cloud is available in white label format for rebranding by MSPs and resellers.
Try SpamTitan Cloud for Thirty Days for Free
We believe the best way to conduct a hosted anti spam comparison is to evaluate the solution in your own environment. For this reason, we are offering all organizations the opportunity to try SpamTitan Cloud for fourteen days for free – with full technical and customer support, and no obligation to subscribe to the service once the fourteen-day trial period comes to a close.
Conducting a hosted anti spam comparison can ensure your organization implements the most effective filter for eliminating spam and email-borne malware. Make sure SpamTitan Cloud is included in your comparison of hosted spam filters as a benchmark against which to compare the merits of any other product you wish to assess.
