Find Top Rated Email Hosted Anti-Spam Solution

Find the Top Rated Email Hosted Anti-Spam Solution

Historically, spam filtering has occurred at ISPs, on enterprise gateways (e.g., a DMZ server), on mail servers, and on desktops. These strategies, especially when they're combined to create a multilayered solution, have been effective in reducing the amount of spam users receive in their mailboxes. But increases in spam create slower mail server processing rates as well as require additional storage for messages flagged as potential spam. That's why many organizations are looking to replace their first-generation spam software solutions either with a spam-filtering appliance or by entrusting spam-filtering tasks to a hosted service.

Hosted services filter email messages before they reach an organization's email server. Using a hosted service reduces server resource usage, requires no additional hardware or software purchases, and means messages identified as potential spam are stored at the host site. Often, hosted service providers can respond quickly to newer forms of spam. Larger organizations often use hosted services to support additional email functions such as outbound filtering and encryption and adherence to compliance policies, but hosted services are also suited for small companies with 100 employees or less or that aren't ready to hire a mail administrator. Number of email users is usually the price determinant in hosted services; the more email users you have, the higher in cost the service becomes. Many service providers make additional services available, including automatic disaster recovery and failover, offsite message archiving (for compliance and business continuity), data redundancy, IM protection, and outbound filtering. The inclusion of one or more of these services can affect the price of a hosted service plan.

Hosted antispam solutions are generally offered on a subscription model—you pick which features you want to implement and supply the number of mailboxes you want covered, then the solution provider gives you a price quote. You can probably expect to pay less overall—especially when you consider administrator time and bandwidth savings—than if you were running your antispam product inhouse, plus you get the benefit of a fixed cost, making budgeting a smidge easier.

Let’s examine the cost-savings in time and bandwidth use. In the case of inhouse spam protection running behind the corporate firewall, your servers must begin the process of receiving each message, then run the various detection methods for spam before rejecting or quarantining a message. Outsourcing this function frees both the bandwidth required to receive these messages and the server processes necessary to examine them—and when you consider that most estimates suggest that 95 percent or more of all messages are spam, you can see that these resource savings could be huge for your organization.

You should also see time savings in administration, though some ongoing tuning of a hosted solution will likely be necessary. Most services provide a means for administrators or end users to check their quarantined messages for false positives as well as to classify and report messages they receive as spam; how well the service implements this review process could be a key factor in choosing a provider.

Setup for a hosted filtering service is usually just a matter of changing your MX records to point to the provider’s servers so that all your incoming mail passes through their filters. Therefore, implementing hosted filtering is generally quite simple. However, this arrangement can cause privacy or security concerns for many companies, so be sure to note what protection a provider offers for your data.

Most spam solutions combine filtering methods, using proprietary scanning algorithms, widely available Realtime Blackhole Lists (RBLs), Bayesian or pattern-recognition filters, and other methods. Because of the many types of spam, and the many characteristics of such messages, it’s widely recognized that using a layered approach to detection relying on different engines and techniques is the most effective way to capture unwanted messages.

Perhaps the strongest selling point in favor of hosted antispam filtering is the service providers’ ability to quickly react to new threats. In addition to using multiple filters, service providers can draw on their vast networks of clients to alert them to the latest type of spam currently hitting email inboxes. For instance, as soon as a message is recognized as spam anywhere on the service provider’s network, the provider should tag that message as spam across all the recipients it’s hosting (assuming, of course, the spam was a mass mailing). The larger the provider’s customer base, the more people available to report spam, and therefore the less likely that any one customer will see spam make it through the filter. By the time a new, malicious email message targets your users, there’s a good chance your hosted provider already has it blocked. Most service providers announce their frequency of updates so you can tell how current your protection should be at any time.

This Buyer's Guide will help you evaluate spam-filtering hosted services.

1. There must be a free trial
Don't shell out cash for something you aren't sure will suit you.
2. Does the company have 24 by 7 live support?
Many companies claim they have 24x7 support, where actually they might not have. Try to call their support line at office/off office hours to test if they do have 24x7 support.
3. It must work in with your current email software
Check for compatibility. Setting up shouldn't require a university degree. Many good services now provide a wizard type set up with automatic configuration.
4. It must be customizable
You should be able to add/edit/delete your list of "approved" addresses.
5. It must be secure and has good user ratings
Check the company background and technology they are using in conjunction with their filtering/blocking service. Also check the company's business background and user ratings.
6. It must has higher spam capture rate and lower false positive rate
The hosted service must have higher (99%+) publicized spam capture rate and lower(1/200K-) publicized false positive rate.
7. Incoming SMTP servers has to be spread around the globe with 100% uptime (SLA)
8. Service provider must be able to trace a single email traveling via their network
9. No lost emails should occur
10. You are able to review spam online to evaluate the false positives matrix