Hosted anti-spam is a great alternative to traditional anti-spam software; this article outlines 10 advantages that come with this solution.
Updating filters, taking user reports, digging through the quarantine folder for the alleged false positive – this is just some of the fun email admins experience daily when dealing with spam. Fortunately, there’s a solution to this – hosted anti-spam. Hosted anti-spam offers many benefits to small to medium sized businesses, moving much of the grunt work associated with spam to a managed service provider. Here are ten advantages that come with this solution:
1. Eliminate single points of failure
Hosted anti-spam filtering solutions use multiple Internet connections to minimize the chance of service interruption. If your Internet connection goes down, your service provider can queue up messages, ensuring delivery as soon as your connection is restored.
2. Anti-malware
Hosted anti-spam solutions work hand in hand with anti-malware solutions, protecting inboxes from infected attachments and phishing attacks.
3. Save bandwidth
Some estimates place the volume of email that is considered spam as high as 90%. Hosted anti-spam solutions filter all that noise out before it hits your pipe, saving you on bandwidth costs.
4. Filter inbound mail
Of course the primary reason to use hosted anti-spam is to filter inbound mail, shielding your users from spam and conserving disk space on your servers. Hosted anti-spam solutions can identify and block new spam messages much more effectively than an on-premise solution, providing better protection to your users.
5. Filter outbound mail
The worst thing a user can do to your corporate email system is to send messages that are interpreted by others as spam. It can take days to get yourself off a spam black-list, and until you do, business communications are compromised. Hosted anti-spam filtering checks your outbound email too, ensuring you don’t suffer from a user’s mistake.
6. Business continuity
One of the best features of hosted anti-spam solutions is that it serves as a back-up to your email systems. When you need to take the email server down for maintenance, hosted anti-spam solutions can continue to accept email and provide users with access through a simple web browser.
7. Archive
Some of the best hosted anti-spam providers can also offer email archiving, to assist with storage issues as well as compliance.
8. Individual quarantines
With hosted anti-spam solutions, you can provide users with their own quarantine folders, enabling them to “self-service” requests to check for blocked or missing email messages. Rather than one catch all mailbox that you must review, users can take care of themselves.
9. Individual reports
Along with that, hosted anti-spam solutions can deliver individual reports to each user detailing blocked messages. They can then choose to release them or delete them, removing this task from your workload.
10. Multi-language support
With global companies, sometimes deploying solutions that support local languages can be very challenging, especially when IT is all based in one country. Multi-language support lets you extend your hosted anti-spam solution to other countries, without needing to deploy language packs or hire an interpreter.
With hosted anti-spam doing the heavy lifting, protecting your inboxes, and conserving bandwidth, you’ve eliminated most of the problems associated with spam. The self service features hosted anti-spam solutions offer empower your users to take care of themselves, leaving you to more important work.
This guest post was provided by Casper Manes on behalf of GFI Software Ltd. GFI is a leading software developer that provides a single source for network administrators to address their network security, content security and messaging needs. Learn more about the benefits of using hosted anti-spam.
All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
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