If you have navigated to this page from a search engine result, the answer to the question Are You Happy with the Level of Office 365 Spam Protection You Get is probably “no”. However, if you have arrived at this page hoping to find a quick fix to the problems of excessive spam and email-borne threats evading detection, you will likely be disappointed.
Quick fixes to the issues of Office 365 spam protection don´t exist. You either have to subscribe to a premium package or engage in a time-consuming administrative process in order to increase spam detection rates, and even then there is no guarantee the level of Office 365 spam protection you get will be any better. It´s a problem experienced by many businesses.
Why is Office 365 Spam Protection So Poor?
The reason why Office 365 spam protection is so poor is because of the way in which the spam filter works. Inbound emails are compared against “real-time block lists” – databases of known sources of spam. When a match is discovered, spam emails are either quarantined, sent to a junk folder, bounced, or deleted, depending on how the filter has been configured.
Once spammers realize their spam emails are being detected, they simply change their mail servers to an IP address that has not been blacklisted. They continue sending spam emails until the new IP address is identified and added to the real-time block list, when they change once again. The cycle continues, and all the time business continue to receive spam emails.
How Greylisting Resolves this Problem
Greylisting is a process that returns incoming emails to their originating servers with a request for the email to be resent. In cases of genuine emails, the originating servers respond to the request within a few minutes and the returning email then goes through the remaining filtering processes. Spammers´ mail servers are typically too busy dispatching spam emails to respond and the request times out.
This process means that, in addition to blocking emails from known sources of spam, filters with the Greylisting capability also block emails from previously unknown sources of spam. Although Greylisting has its critics – who claim it delays the delivery of business-critical mail – the delay of a few minutes can easily be eliminated by whitelisting trusted senders, whose emails then bypass the process.
Other Areas in Which Office 365 is Lacking
Other areas in which Office 365 is lacking (by default) include malicious URL detection (to prevent phishing emails), predictive machine learning techniques (to anticipate new methods of malware deployment) and outbound scanning – which can help identify compromised business email accounts that could be used to distribute malware business-wide from a “trusted” source.
Naturally you can subscribe to a premium service with Microsoft in order to get a higher level of Office 365 spam protection in these specific areas, but your subscription will not include Greylisting. Therefore, the problem of spam emails will continue as before, and with it the chance that a malware-laden phishing email will also avoid detection.
How SpamTitan Offers a Higher Level of Spam Protection
SpamTitan includes all the capabilities you need to compensate for the shortcomings of the Office 365 spam filter. Greylisting, malicious URL detection, predictive machine learning, and outbound scanning are include in the SpamTitan solution as standard, along with many other features that can enhance the level of protection you get against spam emails, phishing, malware and ransomware.
What´s more is that configuring SpamTitan to achieve optimum spam detection rates does not involve a time-consuming administrative process. SpamTitan is quick to set up, easily integrates and synchronizes with existing management and security tools, and flexible settings can be adjusted whenever necessary from a user-friendly, web-based administrative portal.
If these features and our solution´s ease of use appeal to you, do not hesitate to get in touch and request a free trial of SpamTitan. Our Sales Technicians will discuss your existing defenses against spam, phishing, malware, and ransomware and recommended which deployment option is most suitable for your specific circumstances.