How to Reduce Spam without False Positives and False Negatives

It’s one of the most frustrating nuisances of our modern time: technology that simply doesn’t do what it’s designed to do. Computers that take 10 minutes to boot up. Copiers that seem to have a mind of their own. Spam filters that create more false positives and false negatives than you know what to do with.

In a business setting, a spam filter that isn’t quite doing its job is not only a nuisance; it can be downright dangerous. With business users receiving up to 95 non-essential emails every day, you need an effective spam filter to ensure malicious messages aren’t making their way into employee inboxes. Conversely, it’s important that users aren’t missing important emails because they’re being redirected to the spam folder. Most spam checkers filter by content alone, which often leads to mislabeled messages and other problems.

So, let’s take a look at how to reduce spam without false positives and false negatives:

IP Address Reputation

Rather than filtering by content alone, look for an email security solution that includes IP address reputation to protect from spam, viruses, malware and phishing. This will ensure that false negatives don’t threaten your coworkers’ inboxes and that legitimate emails aren’t mistakenly flagged as spam based on their content.

Seek out a solution that updates its list of malicious email senders in real-time using sophisticated email pattern detection technology. By leveraging pattern detection techniques, this technology is especially adept at identifying zombie and botnet attacks, which are becoming all too common in business environments.

Silverlisting

This simple step ensures that spam messages from automated senders don’t accidentally end up in employee inboxes. Silverlisting is an email security feature that’s a more intuitive version of whitelisting, which isn’t effective in protecting against schemes like scamming and phishing. Silverlisting is an SMTP defense technique that blocks automated spammers and helps prevent attacks from IP addresses without existing security signatures.

The Silverlisting approach tracks the source IP addresses for all mail coming into your organization. When a message comes in from a new IP address, it’s automatically deferred into the SMTP transaction. When the sender retries a few minutes later, verifying that he or she is not an automated spammer, the message is accepted. This “handshake” is only required every 30 days for a given IP address, and each user can exempt specific senders from Silverlisting altogether.

A Strong Email Community Feature

Finally, enabling each individual user to establish an email community will help to ensure that legitimate messages aren’t being funneled into their spam folder. Your email security solution should include a verification step for new senders. By using a simple auto-reply email (At Sendio, we call this a Sender Address Verification, or SAV, message), each new sender is invited to join the verified email community. As a result, the end user can rest assured that all incoming email is coming from verified senders.

Your business should be well-protected from spam, without the nuisance of false negatives and false positives. To find out how to reduce spam more effectively within your organization, request more information about Sendio today.