Under the hood: the email you don’t see
October 4, 2010
As many of you already know, SPINEN offers spam filtering services to help keep your email free of junk messages, phishing attempts, and viruses. But it is not something you often think about; you just enjoy a clean, uncluttered inbox.
But what about the mail you don’t see?
There’s a lot going on behind the scenes. Since we began offering the service 3 years ago, the spam filter has processed more than sixty million messages. That’s averaging about 60,000 messages every day.
The real story, though, is how many of these messages are actually passed on to our clients. Of those 60 million messages received, only 3.5 million were allowed to reach our clients. That means that about 94% of the mail was blocked or tagged as suspicious. Those numbers aren’t surprising, really. Last year, software producer Symantec reported that about 90 percent of all email is spam. Those numbers are staggering when one considers the computer resources dedicated to supporting email worldwide.
But there are serious implications for the average business person as well. Junk email — unsolicited ads for products and services — is more than simply annoying; there is a real cost associated with lost productivity. Sorting through email to separate legitimate messages from spam can be time-consuming, deteriorating productivity throughout the day. But new trends in spam bring threats not only to productivity, but network stability and security as well.
Email is now a common vector for viruses and malicious software (“malware”), phishing attempts, and other dangers to your network. It only takes one employee to click a link in an email message to expose not only their own computer, but your entire network to a threat that can be expensive to remove or repair.
There is no bullet-proof solution to spam — any technology can be misused. And spam filtering is not enough; it must work in concert with adequate antivirus software, best-practices network security, and a complete disaster-recovery plan.
Spam filtering is an important factor in network security and employee productivity, however, and SPINEN offers one of the best solutions available today. Using the power of the Barracuda spam filter, we can help protect your inbox from a flood of junk messages and security threats. If you are not currently taking advantage of our spam filtering service, now is a great time to try it out. Find out more about our free trial.
