You may be wondering if the security measures that came with your email are sufficient and if an additional email spam filter is important? In order to answer this question then you need to consider the reports that estimate that level of spam email goes undetected by basic security measures, the amount of time that your staff dedicates to dealing with spam emails and the chance of a spam attack seriously impacting your business.
If you consider that one staff member may be sent as much as ten emails every day you may not think the time taken in deleting or quarantining this will add up to much time wasted. However you you take into account that it takes up to ten seconds to complete this on every minute that is almost two minutes wasted by one worker every day. When you then apply this group wide the situation becomes even more eye-opening. If there are 100 members of staff at your group then this will equate to approximately 200 minutes spent dealing with spam on a daily basis.
This equates to thousands of dollars lost in productivity every year and this is before we address the much more serious threat posed by spam emails that seek to infiltrate your databases with malicious objectives. This can happen very easily with a phishing email, malware or ransomware that is sent to an unsuspecting member of your organization. Even the best-trained employee can be confident in relation to their ability to see a spam email for what it really is. This may even make you believe that there is no need for any additional level of investment in cybersecurity. However, as we have already seen that an organization of 100 people be sent 1,000 emails per day and all it takes is for one of these emails to trick a member of staff then the gravity of the situation hits home.
In order to counteract this threat it is vital to ensure that the group’s spam detection rate is as high as possible in order to reduce the amount of spam email that is landing in the email inboxes of staff members. The best email spam filters available boast a detection rate of up to 99.97%. Configuring a solution like this will make your company almost completely safe from cyberattacks. The solutions that achieve such high detection rates use the following main two spam detection processes:
- Real Time Blacklists and SURBL filters: These will spot all spam emails that are being sent from email spam servers that are known originating points for cyberattacks. The IP address or domain is included in a global blacklist and then checked for when an email is received. This process can also identify, and delete, emails sent to non-existent email addresses. The network manager can set how sensitive these filters are in order to control how much spam needs to be reviewed.
- Greylisting: During this task, all received email traffic is returned to the sender with a request for it to be sent a second time. Email servers that are sending spam are normally overloaded and the request for the email to be sent again is not seen. If the spam email is sent a second time then it must also make it through the RBL and SURBL filters before it can make it to an inbox.