Once email was introduced into offices in the late part of last century, business communications were never the same.
The ease of instantly getting a message to someone and receiving a response back represented a quantum leap in productivity over faxes and snail mail.
Today, email is one of the programs that your employees use more than any other. This makes it both a rich place to look for productivity improvements and a key target for hackers and spammers that want to get messages in front of people.
Employees spend about 28% of their workday reading and replying to email.
If you don’t control the barrage of email that comes into your employees’ inboxes every day, you’re not only leaving yourself at risk of a falling victim to a phishing attack, you’re also making a major mistake when it comes to office productivity.
Email filtering is an effective way to address both areas of your business technology ecosystem.
What Does Email Filtering Do?
First, let’s go over what email filtering does for a business and how it can impact the level of spam and phishing that users deal with daily.
Email filtering, also known as spam filtering, acts as a sentry for your email messages. It’s a service that will filter inbound messages looking for spam, phishing, and emails with suspicious links.
The service can also filter mail into different categories that you set up, such as “internal mail” and “external mail.”
Some of the techniques used by email filters to keep unwanted messages out of user inboxes include:
- Reputation-based email filters
- Whitelisting and blacklisting of message senders
- Content analysis
- Behavior-based learning
The main goal of email filtering is to keep your user inboxes free of dangerous and unwanted email.
Why Does My Business Need an Email Filtering Service?
Over half (53.95%) of all email that your business receives is considered spam (which can include both ads and phishing attacks). That’s a lot of unwanted mail to deal with.
Any technology strategy should include email filtering for a number of reasons.
Reduces Time Spend Sorting Through Spam
If you could reduce the amount of email in your user inboxes by half, that would represent a significant boost in productivity. Without employees having to scroll through and delete all those spam messages, they can pay attention to the messages that are important.
With nearly 30% of a person’s day being taken up by email, filtering out the junk makes a big difference.
Significantly Improves Your Company’s Cybersecurity
Email continues to be the preferred delivery method for ransomware, viruses, and other types of malware. A hacker knows that a certain percentage of users will be tricked into clicking a malicious link or opening a bogus file attachment.
They play the numbers, and so far, they’re winning. That’s why about 94% of all malware is delivered by email.
User training on phishing danger only goes so far because scammers are always coming up with new deceptive tricks up their sleeves. A more effective way to combat phishing and the cybersecurity incidents related to it is to keep phishing emails out of user inboxes.
Email filtering catches phishing emails right when they first come into your email server, so users never have to see them or get fooled by them. This is an important piece of any good IT security strategy.
Reduces Email Storage Problems
Some users never fully delete the email that downloads into the email program on their computer. They may hit “delete” but never empty the trash folder.
As this email accumulates, it adds to the size of your email application, and once you get into gigabytes of mail being stored locally, it can cause software performance problems.
Email filtering reduces the amount of email being downloaded into user email software on their device, thus reduces problems with mail storage getting out of control.
Reduces Interruptions and Search Problems.
Two productivity problems that come along with email activity are:
- The need to search through messages to find the one you want
- Email banners that flash on the screen anytime a new message is coming in
The more email you have to sort through, the longer it takes you to find a particular message. And if you have too much spam coming in, you may even miss or accidentally delete an important legitimate email because it’s sandwiched in between spam.
The other problem is that often an email software will default to flashing a “helpful” banner on your screen when email messages come in. If it does that for every spam message, that’s several interruptions throughout the day that keep you from ever gaining traction on your tasks… email keeps pulling you away.
Both of these productivity-related issues can be fixed by using an email filter that keeps unwanted messages out of your inbox.
Get a Handle on Spam & Improve Cybersecurity
Rocky Knoll Technologies can get you set up with enterprise-class email filtering that eliminates common email productivity drags and significantly improves your cybersecurity.
Contact us today to schedule a consultation. Call 704.594.7292 or reach us online.
