When deciding on an enterprise email filtering service, it’s likely that you’ll find a broad array of options. Although they may have some similar functions, there are important considerations to keep in mind.
Here’s a quick cheat sheet on the top five questions that you should be considering when assessing what kind of email filtering service might be right for your enterprise:
1. Does the service have proven email reduction?
Every company makes marketing claims, and technology firms are no exception. No matter what kind of application, hardware, or hosted service you’re thinking about implementing for email filtering, chances are the company’s own materials will boast that they’re cutting-edge and efficient.
But the proof is in the results. When looking for a service that can back up its claims, make sure that enterprises like yours have benefitted from that technology. For example, a case study might reveal that one of provider’s customers had a 90 percent reduction in the emails received, and that significantly improved productivity.
2. What security protections are available?
Gaining more efficiency through email filtering is important, but an equally top consideration is security. Since malicious email spam can cause considerable, negative impacts for an enterprise, you need to be sure that your provider has controls in place that can provide adequate protection. That means you get more than content filtering and basic anti-spam functionality, and instead have multi-level features that address security issues throughout your email stream.
3. Can you implement DMARC?
Domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance (DMARC) is an open email standard that enables domain-level protection across the email channel. The standard lets email recipients confirm that emails sent from your domain are legitimate, and not the work of a hacker trying to gain trust by using your good name.
DMARC implementation helps to safeguard your brand and is a valuable add-on when it comes to filtering services.
4. Do they rely too heavily on whitelisting?
Many email filter products use whitelisting to compare incoming emails against a list of approved senders, and then delivers the message into employee inboxes. But malicious emails and phishing schemes can sometimes come from a whitelisted email account that has been compromised, giving hackers access to your network and sensitive data.
When comparing email filtering systems, look for a provider that offers more sophisticated filtering processes like pattern-matching technology that can proactively identify malicious senders. This type of ongoing, always update reputation checking technology can be particularly helpful when it comes to higher-level zombie or botnet attacks.
5. What’s the level of false positives?
One of the dangers of content-only email filtering is the high rate of false positives that can occur. This means that legitimate emails gets blocked and sent to users’ junk folders, or even deleted, and they will never know messages arrived. When this happens, important emails from customers, industry announcements, and other essential messages are missed. Content filters look at words, attachments, phrases, links, and images. If a customer sends an email with the wrong combination of words, it could get flagged as spam.
With the volume of email that most enterprises receive, filtering is a crucial part of maintaining productivity and security, but not all filtering technologies are the same, so consider these questions when you compare providers.
To experience top-tier email filtering and management for your enterprise, request a demo of Sendio today.