You are convinced: you need additional protection from your professional email. However, it is difficult to choose from the of solutions available. Between the anti-spam solutions integrated directly into the email service and additional software, your mind is on the fence.
In our view, five features are essential. They must be offered by your future supplier. Here they are.
Feature #1 – Filtering of incoming emails
Of course, your future email security software must offer you efficient filtering of incoming emails. This can be done in several ways:
- Reputation-based email filtering: filtering of known spammers, querying of international reputation databases…
- Whitelist: selection of senders whose emails the company accepts.
- Blacklist: list of senders whose emails the company rejects.
- Content analysis: blocking of a message based on its content (analysis of words, links, images, attachments, etc.).
For even more agility and adaptability, choose a solution that allows you to modify, adapt, delete or add filters easily, in a few clicks and according to the needs of your end users.
Feature #2 – Antispam and antivirus
In relation to the first functionality, it is important to choose a security solution equipped with a powerful anti-spam and antivirus. Indeed, while the first feature makes it possible to ensure the legitimacy of the sender, the latter may unknowingly send spam or a virus. The message must therefore be analysed in depth. Many unwanted emails manage to get past the anti-spam tools built into email solutions and end up in your users’ inboxes.
Choose a solution based on powerful technologies, which queries international shared databases, but also takes advantage of its own spam databases that will adapt to local semantics and submits emails to different antivirus programs for better filtering of cyber threats.
More precisely, in order for the software to define with accuracy whether the email received is spam, it analyses several elements of the email: links, subject, attachments, images, etc. according to set criteria.
Feature #3 – Reputation protection
It is important that your domain name has a good reputation so that emails sent by your users, especially commercial ones, are not considered as spam. For this, a sender score is set up. It considers several elements such as the hard or soft bounce rate, opening rates, spam complaints, regular cleaning of your databases, the use of identification protocols and the quality of your emails (avoid attachments, images or objects that are too advertising).
The purpose of the sender score is to avoid being blacklisted and to increase the deliverability of your employees’ emails.
Feature #4 – The BCP (Business Continuity Plan)
The inability to access an email inbox can have disastrous consequences for business. However, this is what can happen in the event of a system failure or unavailability of an IT infrastructure.
This is why we advise you to choose an email solution with a Business Continuity Plan (or BCP). In this way, your users can continue to use their mailboxes via a backup webmail system, in complete transparency, and will not be affected by the unavailability of the mail server, even if it is in the cloud of a major player. None of them can guarantee or offer 100% availability.
In addition, as soon as access to the server is restored, the email exchanges made during the outage are re-synchronised with the messaging system so that no information is lost. A real bonus.
Feature #5 – Integration with existing environment
Beyond the functionalities, the ease of deployment can make the difference. Choose a email security solution that adapts to your work environment: email provider, hosting, customisation needs of rules according to users, autonomy of use of the solution, availability of APIs, etc.
This is essential to strengthen the protection of your messaging and to keep an independent administration. Whether on-premise or in the cloud, on-site or outsourced, your future solution must adapt to your requirements, not the other way around.
Of course, this list of “must have” features is not exhaustive. However, in our opinion, these are the essential criteria to consider when choosing a security solution for your business email. If you would like to know more about this, please contact us.
