Employees communicate through email whether at workplace or from home or even from a remote place using their mobile phones while on the move, email has become the most important means of communication for every business across the globe. Businesses need continuous and constant flow of communication between all the parties concerned, and anything lack of communication will result in heavy losses to the businesses.

System maintenance, outages, natural disaster, system downtime, hardware failure are some of the reasons that may cause hindrance to the email continuity, exchange of emails among employees or between business and vendors, of an organization. Such disruption may cause businesses to lose communication, business and hence revenues.

Businesses need a backup that ensures continuous flow of communication via emails among employees and between business and vendors so business functions smooth, as usual without hurting the business financially or otherwise, in the event of primary email system failures. Email continuity is one such disaster management program that helps businesses send and receive emails in the event of a server downtime issue.

How does Email Continuity Systems Work?

In the event of your primary email system failure, the backup email system or the email continuity springs into action, copies the emails directed to the primary mail server and guides them to a webmail server that anyone can access from anywhere in the world. This email system makes it easy for employees and vendors to send and receive email; it uses a single and user-friendly interface for the convenience of administration, so IT administrators need not require special skills to manage the email continuity system.

Once the primary email system starts functioning, all the inbound email queued will go to that server, and the primary email server receives a history of the email exchanges that happened during the outage, so you can access these emails in future if required.

As such, email continuity helps businesses stay in touch with vendors, prospects, and help protect business reputation and profitability even during outage times. In addition, email continuity also helps comply with industry regulations of archiving emails, etc. for data audit requests, e-discovery purposes.

Benefits of Email Continuity Services

By deploying email continuity services you will organization will experienced continuous flow of communication within the organization and with outside parties thus helping build better brand reputation and increasing business opportunities and profitability. Some of the other benefits of a backup for your primary email server include:

• Increased Reliability: With email continuity services, you will increase your business reliability and lower the risk of losing business to competitors, as you can stay in touch with your prospects, vendors etc.

• Improves business productivity: Businesses will face downtime at some point or the other and so they allocate resources and time for such downtime. With the help of an effective email continuity service as a backup in the event of primary E-mail server failures that help exchange of emails as usual will help conduct business without any hindrance or loss of productivity.

• Comply with industry standards and regulations: Email continuity helps you to download communication history, which happened during the outage on to the primary email server once it becomes fully functional, so your business can archive such communication for future references, and to comply with industry standards, which requires such archiving of email history.

As the importance of email as primary communication tools grows in businesses, there is a need to provide for a robust email continuity service that helps exchange of email in the most safe and secure way within the organization and between the organization and the outside parties.

When looking to outsource your email continuity services you need to select the best IT services company to help your organization with continuous exchange of emails. Some of the features that best email continuity services have include:

Robust Network Infrastructure: Email continuity and protection services have strong and robust network infrastructure to facilitate high availability of mail servers. Such infrastructure, servers and data centers, spread across geographically diverse areas offer a host of email continuity and email security services for smooth operation of business in the event of downtime or outage of the primary server.

Effective Management and Monitoring: As a secondary system, email continuity systems appear when your primary server experiences downtime, however, these secondary systems are always ready to offer these backup services, as breakdowns can happen at any time. Email continuity systems use time tested software for real world scenarios.

Do you find many junk/ spam emails hitting your inbox? Do you have to dig deep into your inbox to find the relevant and important emails? Are you worried all of this is consuming your productive time?

Apart from eating into your productive time, Junk email, spam email carries serious threat to the credibility or even the existence of your organization; the content of such email contains malware, phishing material and other types of viruses, which attack your computer networks and compromise the security of your organization’s confidential data. Well, using email filtering is the solution to saving time and protecting your organizations data.

Email filters offer great features to help you fight spam and other phishing emails. These powerful tools come with great features that help you block or direct emails coming from specific email address go to certain folders, or completely block emails coming from a certain domain altogether. You can also set the filtering levels as low, medium, or high. Against to the saying one-size fits all, there may not be an email filter that applies to all your requirements, you will have to choose the right filter based on your organization’s specific requirements and the features the filters offer. Some of the features that these filters offer include:

• Filter Settings: The best Email filter software should have amazing capabilities to block any suspicious looking email, so it does not enter and contaminate your inbox. Some of the best email filters come with a host of features such as white lists, black lists, settings for community and forums, settings based on sensitivities, response and challenge techniques to help you fight spam. With these features, you will be able to quarantine or completely block any virus, malware, etc. you can also get email filters that help you block email by IP addresses, country of Origin, server, etc.

• Accounts covered: You need to make sure the email filter you subscribe to is capable of offering protection to all the users in your organization. Your organization may have multiple users with different accounts all of which requires strong protection against viruses, spam, malware, or other types of phishing attack emails. The best email filter software will have sophisticated technique to identify any attack to steal your users, customer’s sensitive information including personal or banking related information.

• Compatibility: When selecting an email filter for your organization, you need to make sure that it is compatible with the current version of the email client that you have deployed. In general, the best email filters available support all types of email clients and Web Mail service providers such as outlook express, thunderbird, and similar application including POP3/SMPT. They also offer support for web-based application including Gmail, yahoo mail, Hotmail, etc.

• Flexibility: The best email filters understand the importance of personalization. An organization should have the options to change the settings easily to suit their specific needs. The best email filters will offer flexible rules so any user of an organization with any level of technical competency can easily change the settings to suit their changing requirements.

Well, most email filters available come with all these features, however looking for the best software you need to verify a few factors such as:

• Verify the rate of spam and virus protection to see if it meets the standards as advertised by the vendor.

• If the spam filters are compatible with all the operating systems, and especially with the ones that your organization uses.

• What Anti-virus software does the email filter employ to protect your inbox from outside attacks? How effective is this anti-virus software?

• The best email filter also helps you with an option to verify the recipient. Make sure that the software you chose such a capability.

• What is the error percentage in the functioning of the software? For example does the software quarantine any relevant and important mails in an error, if so, what is the rate of such instances?

• Testimonials from previous clients are very important. Verify if the vendor can show references from previous clients who can vouch for the effectiveness of the email filter software.

Finally, customer service is the crucial factor in all purchase decisions. Professional email filter software vendors offer excellent support and help clients with any issue that they may face using such filters. Consider all such factors, and any other factors that your organization may require specifically, to make sure you get the software that scores well on all parameters and not just on one or two.

Email spam is increasing at an alarming rate. According to SecureList report, the third quarter of 2016 saw a 3.03% increase in spam in comparison to last year. Majority of the spam contain a malicious attachment that downloads ransomware on computers. Hence, businesses need to employ good anti-spam solution to counter this threat. Here are a few benefits of using anti-spam solutions.

Benefits of an Email Spam Filter

Spam emails cause a lot more than inconvenience. They hamper the productivity of workforce as employees spend their valuable time sifting through mail inboxes and deleting spam. By using anti-spam solution you can prevent spam from reaching inboxes which will increase the productivity.

Also, according to Cyberoam 2014 report, there are more than 54 billion spam messages are sent every day and the number keeps increasing. If you do not have email spam filter, a large volume of spam entering your network will hog bandwidth and reduce the efficiency of your email server. With a good anti-spam filter in place, the spam will not enter your organization network and save bandwidth for legitimate traffic.

There are so many different types of anti-spam solutions available in the market and the big question is how do you select the right one for your business. Here are some of the important features that you need to look for while selecting an email spam filter.

Effective Spam Filtering

The email spam filter needs to be effective in blocking 90% or more spam mail and save bandwidth and all incoming mail should be scanned automatically. IP reputation filtering is a useful technology that helps in identifying 80% of mails even without looking at contents of the emails.

The IP filtration method uses an IP-based blocklist offered by IP reputation services who gather information about IP addresses that were used by spammers. The IP address list is distributed to anti-spam solutions using the BGP routing protocol. Using this IP address list, the email spam filtering can block mail coming from these IP addresses.

The email spam filter should be based on “cocktail approach” where multiple detection tests and techniques are used to filter spam. This approach is highly effective as spammers cannot fool all anti-spam tests at a time.

Virus Detection

A large amount of spam contains viruses and other malware that can hamper your system and steal data. The email spam filter should have virus detection software that should scan email before it reaches inbox and delete it. Also, it should be able to scan attachments and detect viruses and delete them as well.

The email filter should have signature less virus detection technology that closes early hour virus vulnerability gap during massive virus outbreaks. It protects your email server against the initial peak of attack. The benefit of this technology is clear- no need to perform signature updates.

Easy Management of White and Black Lists

Though you have email spam filter installed, you should have complete control over white and black email lists. You only decide which email is legitimate and which is spam. The spam emails go in the blacklist while legitimate email goes in the whitelist.

The email spam filter should automatically add all email addresses in your Address book in whitelist. The list should get updated whenever you add any email address in your Address book.

Outage Protection

The anti-spam filtering solution should offer outage protection for uninterrupted email communication. In an event of an outage, the anti-spam solution should be able to receive all emails and once your email server is back online, it should deliver all emails to your server automatically.

Quarantine Reports

Weekly quarantine reports will enable you to analyze a number of spam messages stopped by the email spam filter. It will help you visualize the spam threats and increase the filtering rules based on findings.

Email Recovery

The email spam filter should have an option to move any mail to quarantine folder to judge its legitimacy. The email recovery option should allow you to check and recover legitimate emails from the quarantine folder and delete the spam automatically after a few days.

An email spam filter protects your organization from annoying spam emails. By focusing on important features, you can ensure your organization enjoys the highest level of protection against spam and the anti-spam solution offers you good value for money.

How do you protect your organization from spam? Please feel free to comment.