It is important to be clear that while in general hosted solutions may be more effective and easier to manage, not all hosted email filtering services are the same. Some have better capabilities than others because they go to greater lengths to achieve higher performance.
Some hosted email filtering services also allow IT administrators in each business to apply some additional rules to either whitelist or blacklist a sender or domain. This would in turn help to protect the business better from email-borne threats.
The best hosted email filtering services must be user friendly because if it’s too complicated, then it will become difficult for the administrators to apply any changes that are specific to their environment. Settings can even be tweaked to be role or user dependent.
Because hosted email filtering is done outside the organization network, there is less strain on companies’ internal resources such as network or memory on servers. Good spam filtering services incorporate greylisting and outbound email filtering, both of which can be quite resource intensive for an organization. Outbound email filtering is important as it means emails are scanned before they leave the corporate network. Outbound scanning prevents your business’s IP address from being blacklisted. This can easily happen if one of your email users unknowingly downloads a virus onto their machine or brought a malware or virus-infested device from home and attached to their computer. Blacklisting would lead to emails bouncing – failed deliveries – and potentially negatively affect your business reputation online.
On the other hand, greylisting helps to protect organizations from receiving spam from not-yet-known sources of spam. This is particularly important for protection against advanced threats such as email phishing, malware and ransomware.
