Third Party Spam Filters…Not Just About Spam Mail

by Rich Wagoner, CITP.CPA | Principal, Director of Technology

If you have your own internal email server (Exchange or another comparable one), we would highly recommend that you implement a third party spam filter. Third party spam filters are those that will pre-analyze your mail before it’s delivered to your server and filter out the junk before you receive it in your local server and then mailbox. Some of these systems will send you a log file and let you approve incorrectly categorized mail daily or weekly, so don’t think that you will lose mail.

Not only will it save you a ton of time fighting through your spam in your inbox, it will also help in a number of other areas. The biggest area of savings is potential down time. There are a ton of emails out there that come with Malware attachments such as the latest Voicemail Message email (http://techhelplist.com/index.php/spam-list/314-new-voicemail-notification-whatsapp-malware) or FedEx delivery message (http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/ups.asp). There is also a huge spam category considered Phishing messages (those messages ‘fishing’ for your information) like the lost password or verify your bank information messages. These systems also scan and filter these types of messages that if let through, allows your users to potentially click on the links and attachments thus creating a ton of potential downtimes and headaches for your IT department.

Other ways outsourcing your spam filtering can pay for itself:

1. It saves bandwidth – Spam goes to the third party then they filter the junk out and you only get the good mail, thus less mail traffic using your internet bandwidth.

2. It saves hard drive space – You will utilize less space on your mail server by not storing all of the filtered junk mail.

3. It can save you time – You won’t be cleaning up malicious software from the inappropriate emails. In addition, a lot of these allow you to forward your mail through them which will prevent you from getting on blacklists and having your outbound messages blocked by other spam filter systems.

4. It can help in downtime situations – if your mail server is offline a lot of these systems will hold mail until your server is back online. Also, a number of the third party systems can be used in disaster situations and allow users access to their email when your server is not available or will be offline for more than just a couple of hours.

5. It can help maintain a clean mail server – Some of the systems offer archiving services to help eliminate the burden of excessive mailboxes stored on your server.

6. Potential downtime savings if a massive spam attack is unleashed on your server.

Keep in mind, we are not advocating that you stop updating your PCs or your Exchange server. Malicious software can make its way in via other methods so please be sure you keep all your systems updated and patched as well (See previous article on “Do you need antivirus software on your PC”).

Contact Information:
Rich Wagoner, CITP.CPA | Principal, Director of Technology | 317.260.4400 | rwagoner@greenwaltcpas.com