Reducing spam email and using phishing protection

Let’s start with the obvious – we’re not referring to the tins of meat or a recreational activity down at the local pond. What we’re talking about is saving your business time by reducing the volume of spam emails you have to deal with, and protecting your business from phishing email scams.

How do we reduce spam emails and phishing scams?

We put a system in place, where your inbound emails are screened before you receive them. Anything deemed to be spam or a threat is held back in a quarantine area, with the good stuff passed straight on to your Inbox as normal.

How do I see what’s in the quarantine?

There are two ways you can see what has been filtered out. Up to three times a day, you will receive an email report, listing the emails in quarantine. From there, if you’re sure it’s something legitimate, you can release it and it’s delivered to your Inbox a few minutes later. A second option is to log into your quarantine area at any time, using a web portal.

What if something legitimate keeps getting caught in quarantine?

This is no problem at all. You just let us know that the person or business is a trusted safe sender, and we can add them to a whitelist which means they will bypass the filter and future emails will come straight through to you without a problem.

You can add email addresses/domains to a block list

On the flip side of the whitelist, there is the blacklist. On the rare occasion, a spammer has made it through the filter, then you can let us know and we’ll add them to the blacklist. This means that any future emails are blocked going forward.

Do I need it for all email addresses in our business?

Ideally, you would have this for all active email addresses in the business, as that will really help reduce the chances of a Cyber Security attack. However, if you want to, you can specify which email accounts you want it on for you, and which ones you don’t want it on for. You may want to do this for budget reasons as the filtering system is charged on a per-mailbox basis.

Will this stop all spam and all threats?

No. And anyone who tells you they have a system which does that, frankly, isn’t being honest with you. You can’t stop everything single threat out there, mainly because there is always something new which works in a different way from the last known threat. What this does is massively reduce your chances of being affected by an email-based threat and save you time deleting spam emails all day.

We hope that explains a little how we can help you with email-based threats and spam, if you do have questions about the service, please do reach out to us and we’ll be happy to help you.

Gavin Moorhouse is the owner of Lucid Computer Solutions, based in Redditch, they support the Worcestershire and Warwickshire areas. Yes, he uses the spam filtering system outlined in this article.