Anti-Spam Filters: Why Are They Important to You
Email is one of the most important forms of communication in today’s world and if there’s one thing that is decreasing the credibility of emails, it is spam. Spam messages are those that are irrelevant to the receiver, may or may not contain malicious content and are most probably ads or sales push of a product/service the receiver is not interested in. But that shouldn’t be so bad right? Spam constitutes 60% of the emails circulated each day, thus decreasing the credibility of emails rapidly. So the answer is it is pretty bad.
While anybody would find spam annoying, business organizations face the maximum wrath of spam messages, affecting their productivity and wasting their resources. Usage of anti-spam filters is the only way to limit spamming to a great extent, increase productivity and avoid malicious attacks. Read on to know more.
What are Anti-Spam Filters?
In order to tackle spam messages, many business organizations and institutions use spam filters to filter out the spammy IP addresses and malicious content. The anti-spam technology involves a number of filters like content based filters, list based filters, collaborative filters etc. For example, a content based filter would search for malicious content and attachments in a mail and filter them out before it your reaches your mail inbox. Similarly a list based filter would block all the black listed IP addresses and look for new ones to create separate lists namely black list and white list IP addresses. In simple, a black list is a list of IP addresses you avoid and white list is a list of IP addresses that you trust.
3 Reasons Why You Should Use Anti-Spam Filters
1.Spam is very bad for your team’s productivity
When you are using email as the official means of the company, your email server transfer thousands of mails every day. The emails are official and pretty important to ignore. If 60% of your employee’s inbox is filled spam mails, your employee will have a hard time finding the relevant mails and each time deleting new spam. This is distracting and also frustrating on the employee’s mindset given that they have a job to do.
2. Spam is expensive for your company
It is not just the productivity we are talking about, it is also about the maintenance of your email server. If 60% of the mails the inbox transfers are spam messages, it is a waste of resource and a waste of time for your technical end. And if those spam messages are malicious, the repercussions are much more expensive. Anti-spam filters identify such content and filter them out.
3. A spam is not always just a spam
A spam message is not always a sales push or an unwanted advertisement. A few messages are deliberately planted with viruses, malwares and trojan horses to infiltrate your email server and eventually infiltrate your computer system. This is a serious security threat and the bigger the company, the higher the risks. Thus anti-spam filters won’t just reduce the redundancy in your emails but also play a major role in fighting security threats.
Three Best Features of Antispam Software
Spam is a major concern in business organizations as they occupy a major portion of their email inboxes. It is said that spam messages add up to 60% of the emails that are circulated everywhere. This is a very huge number and affects big organizations in ways it is difficult to comprehend. Huge amount of spam as such create a lot of problems to business organizations which will be discussed below.
The article will also discuss the advantages of employing antispam software in email servers of business organizations and the three best features offered by software. Curbing spam messages, avoiding malicious content and creating list of the blacklisted IP addresses are 3 of the major features of antispam software. We will discuss these features in detail and understand how each feature will help in reducing spam a little less and keep the company mailboxes free from spam and security attacks.
What does Antispam software do?
Antispam software is made up of many email filter that block certain emails based on pre-defined directions. These filters are of many types including content based, list based, collaborative etc. Content based and list based filters are the most popular type of antispam filters in the antispam software. While content based filters block messages that have click-bait, marketing content, list based filters block those mails that are coming from black listed IP addresses. All in all, the antispam software ensures that spam is found and blocked from entering your mail inbox.
3 Best Features of Antispam Software
1. Black List and White List
The first thing that antispam software do is they list out both black listed and white listed IP addresses. Black listed IP addresses are those from where spam messages are sent to various locations. White list IP addresses are those that are trusted and coming from a regular contact. Having both these lists will make it a lot easier for an organization to prioritize important mails and avoid the unwanted ones. The lists are a great source of resource and can be used by other organizations as well.
2. Preventing Security Threats
Antispam software won’t just block spam messages from entering your inbox but also prevent any security threats that come along with these mails. Many spammers are also hackers who deliberately hide viruses, malwares and trojan horses in these mails to infiltrate email servers and gain control of computer systems of organizations. Spam messages are a serious threat to system security and rather than ignoring them it is wise to avoid them using antispam software.
3. Email Recovery and Quarantine
There might be instances where it is too difficult for the filters to judge if a mail is spam or not. In situations these doubtful mails are moved to quarantine for verification by the receiver and helps in recovering the mail if it is authentic and was mistaken to be a spam. This way the antispam software allows a certain level of autonomy to the email user and prompts chances to make changes.
Why Your Small Business Must Use VoIP Phone Systems?
Telephone systems are a must in business organizations, be it a big business or a small one. Business telephone systems have evolved a lot since decades from single line to multi line phone systems, from public switched telephone networks (PSTN) to voice over internet protocol (VoIP) phones. In this article we shall discuss the features and advantages of using VoIP phone systems in small offices. Read on to know more.
What are VoIP Phone Systems?
VoIP phone systems are those that use the internet to make phone calls unlike the traditional public switched telephone network. These phone systems are much like the regular small business phone system comprising of a speaker phone, microphone, display for called-id, power source etc. The only thing that’s additional in these phones is that they have an Ethernet or wireless network hardware to send and receive messages on data network. Since these phone systems use an internet protocol, they come with a load of features that are not found in regular business phone systems. These features are particularly advantageous in a small organization. A few of those advantages are discussed below.
Advantages of Using VoIP Phone Systems
1. Call Features
A range of call features including call hold, call forward, call hunt, conference calling, auto-attendant etc. can be found in business VoIP phone service. These call features don’t need any manual monitoring and will be managed by the phone system itself. If you are looking for a receptionist who can attend and transfer calls, you might as well buy a VoIP phone system.
2. Easy to Install
VoIP phones are maintained using a convenient web portal and it is very easy to add and remove numbers using these portals. There is no additional hardware or software required and all one needs is IP phones which are connected to each other using an internet protocol.
3. Saves Money
It is not just the installation and configuration of VoIP phone systems are easy, these processes are also inexpensive. In addition to this, since the phones are operated using an internet protocol like internet, the phone calls are considerably cheaper when compared to PSTN phone systems. If your company requires a lot of international phone calls to be made, a VoIP phone is what your company needs.
4. Integrate Fax
Fax is sometimes required to transmit important documents within a short period of time. VoIP phone systems are equipped with a feature known as the virtual faxing which enables users to send and receive faxes whenever needed without the need of papers or printers. Only the assigned email accounts to each IP phone are sufficient to send and receive fax over VoIP phone systems.
5. Flexibility
If you are not sure of the number of phone lines you would need and there is an uncertainty in the number of employees in your organization, you would have problems if you were using a PSTN system. However, this problem won’t exist with VoIP phones as it is very convenient to scale up and scale down the number of phone connections using the web portal that comes along with the phone system.
Why You Might Need Email Archiving Services
It is very difficult to imagine a workplace where emails are not used. It is an unwritten rule that for any formal communication, emails are the best means of communication. Be it business organizations or institutions like universities and public departments, emails are used by everybody to keep the communication crisp, to the point and integrated with attachments. Business organizations have to deal with a lot of emails and bigger the organization, greater the number of mails that circulate in the organization every day. It is a tedious task to archive these mails for future reference in-house. In such cases availing email archiving services is the best thing to do. This article will explain the reason to do so and also explain how email archiving services work.
What is email archiving?
Every large business organization will have an email server that maintains the organization’s entire email system and acts as a junction to send and receive messages. While few organizations would have hundreds of mails circulated every day, some of them might have thousands. Regardless of the organization size, emails are important and it is crucial that they are saved for future references. However, it is a laborious task to maintain and index lakhs of mails. In order to avoid this, mails are archived in data centers or on cloud to keep the email systems of the organization free and active.
How are emails archived?
Emails are archived by email archiving services by two methods. Either the mails are bypassed to a cloud directory or the mails are physically transferred to the data centers of these archiving services. It is a very costly affair to do this in-house and indexing the mails is not an easy task either when you have to dig up old mails and look for information.
Why You Might Need Email Archiving Services
1.To comply with regulatory requirements
Business organizations are required to store their emails as per the regulatory norms set by the governmental agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission. The norms require that a company stores and protects its emails so that they can be retrieved easily whenever required.
2. During audit and legal issues
During audits and during legal issues, indexing previous mails for crucial mails is very important. Since emails are the official means of communication in offices, they become much more important during audits and implementation of legal frameworks.
3. Data Storage is limited
Every email server will have a maximum limit and after that there will be no space left for new mails. If the previous mails are archived using a mail archiving service, it is possible to delete them on the server to make room for new mails.
4. To have a backup of data
There are chances that the email servers may go down or be a victim to hacks and security attacks. In inevitable cases like these, crucial information is always lost. If emails are archived using an email archiving service, you will never have to worry about losing data.
