On a daily basis we are looking at many email issues from spam, viruses, spoofing and more.
As part of this constant stream of work we are always looking at ways to improve how this is handled, and the security offered to clients.
Incoming Mail Improvements
We are adding new rules and training the platform all the time to detect spam and stop these messages getting into your inbox.
But we have recently made some big changes to the platform giving us better flexibility and customisation for your business. This is done in the form of profiles, and each customer now has their own profile meaning we can almost tweak everything to your needs.
An example of things that can be customised for your business via a profile are: –
- Anti-spam actions [Delete, quarantine, tag, etc]
- Dedicated Blacklist, not to be confused with RBLs which are also known as blacklists. This is one we control!
- Dedicated whitelist. We do not like adding items to this as it means they are not scanned for any form of spam or virus.
Outgoing Mail Improvements
We have in the past added some outgoing protection, like anti-spam and anti-virus. But this has always been our weakest point, until now….
Scanning Systems
Our scanning systems now do not just scan email you send and make sure it is not spam or contains a virus, and deletes them but actually informs you of this in the way of a bounce message.
Our scanning systems also make sure your content typed in messages do not match our DLP (Data Loss Prevention) rules. If message does get flagged for this we are alerted so we can contact your business to discuss the issue and resolve.
Authentication
We now no longer just authenticate your businesses server via your location, but we have now started authenticating with location and email address of sender. This means that only people from your business with a business email can use our system to send messages via our filtering system.
Policy Records and Reporting
We have for awhile now publish SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records, and digitally signed emails with DKIM. But we have found this is not enough to stop people spoofing emails as not everyone listed to these rules.
Earlier this year we started publishing DMARC rules to say apply the SPF and DKIM where you can, but without any reporting we could not see if this had improved the issue or not.
We now have a new DMARC Reporting platform which we have used at the start of this month to harden our published DMARC rules informing people to apply SPF and DKIM strictly and reject any messages which do not match.
This all sounds good, but what is best of all is we have added rules to DMARC for recipient servers to report back to us meaning we can monitor if your messages are delivered or not and if anyone is trying to spoof you and from where.
This has been so successful we have already seen improvements in mail flow and a reduction in spoofing. Unfortunately any business with no email protection on it will still be hit as they have nothing to apply these rules.
Summary
As you can see we are always aiming to improve our services, and this is a good taste of what has been done as of late.
If you are having email issues, why not look at taking up our spam filtering and protection service?