Spam is one of the leading causes of email traffic congestion and loss in productivity. Spam is essentially unwanted email, it may be from a known source, but can still be spam mail. Surveys the world over have estimated that thousands of man hours are wasted by corporates the world over, due to useless spam mails.

Impact of spam mail on productivity

Just imagine a regular employee coming to work to discover 30 new mails, it will take him a good 10-15 minutes to figure out which ones are genuine and which one's are just useless spam. Now extrapolate this figure to 10,000 employees, that makes it 2500 man hours a day that are spent filtering spam! And throw in the added complication of viruses from unwanted attachments, one can clearly see that the productivity of a company is being affected by spam. The solution is more often than not to go out and buy expensive spam filtering software that is then installed on each computer and actively scans each mail before it reaches an employee's inbox. An additional virus scanning software also needs to be purchased.

The problem with software on a per computer basis is that its pretty expensive, an anti spam software for 10,000 users can cost nearly half a million dollars including the price of an anti virus software. And then there are software problems that need to be fixed which usually require hiring additional manpower. The solution to this problem is much simpler if there is a separate server, that first receives all the mails for a company, scans them and then forwards them to the company's internal mail server. This ensures that a company does not spend any money on hardware, software and maintenance, and in addition have state of the art spam filtering and email scanning.

How spam filtering services work

Spam filtering services are fast, effective and best of all they take away the headache of actually installing software on each computer and then additional maintenance costs. The first step in installing a spam filtering service is to route all emails to the spam filtering service's server. This is what is called the setup phase and usually takes anywhere between an hour to a day, based on the complexity of the accounts a company has and the level of customization. Once an organization successfully sets up emails to be routed to a spam filtering service's server. The emails are then processed in three steps

Step 1

The emails are first scanned for viruses, trojans and other malware. Spam filtering servers usually have more than one anti-virus scanner, this ensures that every email is not just scanned by a single scanner but actually put through multiple anti-virus scanners, that are updated on a daily basis to make sure that the anti-virus protection is the latest. If any email is infected it is cleaned, if the virus cannot be removed, then based on the client's specifications the email is either deleted or stored separately.

Step 2

Phase two involves putting the email through spam filters, a spam filter actually checks an email for trigger keywords (popular trigger keyword examples are "Cheap Viagra", "Win cash awards") and also checks the sender's address against a known database of spammers. Most anti-spam services allow downloading the spam into a spam folder of the inbox, so even if the anti-spam server has accidentally marked genuine mail as spam it is not lost. During the setup phase of the spam filtering service, the client can decide if they want all spam mail deleted or want it forwarded to a spam account.

Step 3

This is the final phase, all mails are virus free, spam free and can either be downloaded at the client's leisure or are automatically forwarded to the client's email server. Once again this depends on the way the client has configured the spam filter service.

It is not necessary that all spam filtering services offer virus scanning, in fact most anti-spam filtering services actually charge a little extra for virus scanning services, the best option for any organization is to look around and find a spam filtering service, that offers all features at attractive pricing.