Why spam filtering matters (and how it actually works)
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Roughly half of the e-mail sent on the internet today is spam, phishing or malware. Without good filtering, your team would spend the first hour of every workday clicking "Junk" and the IT team would spend their week chasing ransomware infections from clicked links.
What modern spam filtering catches
- Bulk spam - the obvious "buy our pills" promotional mail.
- Phishing - fake bank, SARS or Microsoft e-mails trying to harvest credentials.
- Business E-mail Compromise (BEC) - a targeted attack pretending to be your CEO or a known supplier asking for an urgent payment.
- Malware attachments - infected Word docs, ZIP files and PDFs that install ransomware when opened.
- Outbound spam - mail your team accidentally sends because their account was compromised, which can get your whole domain blacklisted.
Why built-in filters are not enough
Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and cPanel all have basic spam filtering built in. They catch the obvious bulk mail. They miss most targeted phishing because each phishing campaign is small and unique - the filter has not seen it before. Dedicated spam filtering services use multiple scanning engines and a much wider threat-intelligence network, so they catch the targeted attacks too.
How our spam filter works
We use SpamExperts, a cloud filter that sits in front of your existing mail platform. We change one DNS record (your MX record) so all mail flows through SpamExperts first, gets scanned by multiple engines (signature-based, heuristic, machine learning), and only the clean mail is forwarded to your real mailboxes. Suspect mail is held in a per-user quarantine that you review via a daily summary e-mail.
Outbound filtering matters too
If one of your team members' accounts gets compromised, attackers will use it to send spam from your domain. Within hours your domain ends up on a blacklist and legitimate mail starts bouncing. Outbound filtering catches the spam before it leaves and quarantines the compromised account.
