Like most IT professionals, you have likely been using an email spam checker to protect your company and end users. That means everyone is protected from the vast majority of email threats, right? Unfortunately, that’s not the case: many spam blockers, are missing critical features that could leave your organization at serious risk.
How does your solution stack up? Here are four key things every email spam checker should do for your company:
1. Look for the most common spamming behaviors
Today, it’s not enough to simply filter email by content—particularly in a business environment, where many of the hallmarks of spam, such as filter-triggering words, are commonly used in communications. Instead of focusing solely on content, your email spam checker should also look for the most common spamming behaviors, including a blatantly wrong or missing HELO/EHLO, a missing reverse DNS in the IP address, or no domain name in the sender or recipient address.
2. Track IP address reputations
Ideally, your email spam checker would continuously track source IP addresses for all senders—24 hours a day, seven days a week. Most spam security solutions claim to track the reputations of IP addresses, but if they aren’t making a point to proactively update their known spammers lists, they’re missing the new IP address that are used every single day.
For improved protection from evolving spam, viruses, malware, phishing, spear-phishing and other email-borne threats, look for an email spam checker that updates its list of confirmed bad email senders in real-time, 24 hours a day. It’s also helpful for the checker to employ pattern detection, which considers both the recipients of messages and the structure of the emails themselves as a way to detect typical spamming behaviors from zombie and botnet attacks.
3. Provide SMPT defense
Many organizations use mail servers that run on an open relay, meaning it accepts and delivers every type of message that comes its way. And if a suspicious message gets bounced back, the open relay will often retry delivery, paving the way for spammers of all kinds. That’s why it’s so important to have a spam checker that offers SMTP defense to guard against automated spamming computer programs.
Here’s how SMTP defense works: When a message is sent to your organization from a new IP address, it is automatically deferred into the SMPT transaction. When the message is retried, this digital “handshake” is considered proof that the sender is an actual human and not a spam computer program. This ensures that each incoming message is from a legitimate IP address, which helps protect your organization from spam, phishing, annoying bulk emails and more.
4. Protect your company’s reputation
Does your email spam solution protect your organization from spoofing schemes? If not, you need a solution that offers domain-based message authentication, reporting and conformance (DMARC). DMARC is an open email standard that works with SPF and DKIM to protect your email channel at the domain level. The feature lets your email recipients confirm that messages that seem to be sent by your company are actually coming from your domain and not a hacker.
If your spam checker isn’t giving you these key features, you can bet that it’s not effectively protecting your organization, leaving your end users exposed to today’s growing number of cyber threats. It’s important to find an spam checker that includes each of the protocols and filters listed above; working together, they are key to a comprehensive email security solution that will keep threats such as spam, viruses, phishing, spear-phishing and skimming at bay.
After noticing that most spam checkers fall short, the team at Sendio created Opt-Inbox™ and Email Security Gateway™ to provide enterprises a more comprehensive approach to email security. Ready to upgrade to a spam solution that actually works? Learn more about all of the Sendio Email Security Products.
