Email protection strategy is essential if we are concerned with the vulnerability of our email system. Many people suffer the embarrassment of notifying and apologizing to angry co-workers, bosses and customers; because their email messages contain a dangerous virus. Many people prefer to use email clients so they can keep message archives and compose messages offline.
This could open a path for hackers to steal data. In this case, we should define basic protection for our email system. Antivirus software should help us to scan newly downloaded attachments, before we open them. To be safe, we should continue to update the antivirus program and we should make sure that it is integrated with our client email software.
Another thing that we should consider is adding spam filtration mechanism. Standard antivirus solutions won’t do anything to deter spammers. It is believed that more than 80 percent email messages we get are actually spam. We should check our email client software for proper filtering tools. However, these built-in features may do a rather disappointing job of distinguishing specific images. If possible, we should invest on commercial email filtering software that can accurately locate spam emails based on message content, IP address and other factors. The other thing that we should do is by beefing up the level of protection on our email server.
Email servers are dedicated computers that receive, store and send email messages. They also support various relevant functions such as automatically scan attachments for virus, before they are stored. This is also a good place to install a spam filter. It is better to use commercial spam filtering software, because we could be able to use many of their features in email servers. We should be able to tune the filtering at greater accuracy. Even clever spammers find it challenging to defeat properly configured email servers that could use heuristic methods to detect spams, regardless of variations in messages and IP address.
We may also use sophisticated gateways to improve the email protection system. By using gateway, we can alter the MX records for our domain to gateway. It means that all emails will be sent to the gateway, instead of directly to email servers. Gateways are additional layer of security. We can use it to segregates dubious email messages into quarantine, remove detected viruses, repel massed email attacks and do other things. Gateways also improve performance, because the server will handle lower load. This can be achieved, because spams are filtered and removed on the gateways, instead of on the server.
Email gateways may use proper techniques to detect spam. They won’t only watch for common keywords and phrases used in spam. They could also analyze specific attack patterns reported by other gateways. After accepting spam messages, they will be traced back to specific sources. With gateways, it will be easy to augment software analysis with around the clock analysis and human monitoring. Accuracy will be higher and we could perform tuning more frequently.