Email Anti Spam And Virus Protection For Businesses - There Is Hope
By John Tourloukis
With anti spam vendors offering minimal cost licensing, businesses can now afford advanced email spam and pathogen protection with a straightforward simple to use interface at a significantly lower cost. The great thing about technology is that as it develops it becomes quicker, extra features and cheap. Over the last few years the same evolution has taken place with anti spam technology and services. Largely this is assigned to the opensource software community plus enterprising companies augmenting the capacities of this software and packaging it into easy to use anti spam appliances.

it's not practical to have anti spam software running on desktops in a networked business environment. Handling all employee junk email software at the desktop isn't practical. It can be a nightmare and costly in terms time and licensing.

Spam appliances sit in front of your email server so that when email comes in it'll first go to the spam appliance and the e-mail will be scanned for spam as well as viruses. The filter will block the message if it identified as know spam. If the filter isn't sure if the e-mail is real it'll quarantine and hold the email at the filter and it will be stored until the recipient deletes it, releases it to their email box, or they can white list a trustworthy correspondent so that future emails will not be held back. This will greatly scale back the load on your email server and scale back your bandwidth wants. We have seen anti spam systems block up to 83% of incoming messages. This can help extend the life of your e-mail server and push back the need for upgraded capacity.

Most pathogen outbreaks happen thru e-mail and for small cost an appliance can block viruses before they reach your network and user's inboxes. This provides an extra layer of defense as well as your current anti virus solution.

businesses have two options if they use an appliance based solution for their spam and virus control. They can buy and administer their own filter. This is a good option if you've a enormous number of employee mailboxes to guard and the technical staff to administer the spam appliance. Companies also have the option to outsource their spam control as a hosted service. This is a good choice for smaller firms and if information technology isn't your specialty.

If you purchase your own spam filter, a subscription to updates might also be needed. Ensure you get upfront pricing for the add-ons that you'll need. If you've got more than 100 email users and the technical staff to maintain the spam appliance, buying your own filter could be your best option. Generally the basic model will work for most setups. Large organizations with thousands of users will require a spam filter appliance with increases capacity and features. Spam appliances are designed to work with all mail systems but some do have precise enhancements for Exchange server Microsoft's preferred partnership software and mail servers that support LDAP ( light weight index access custom ). Spam appliances use the LDAP custom to determine recipients before delivering messages to your e-mail server, this avoids consuming server resources.

If your business has five to 100 staff, then an outsourced anti spam and virus filter service is going to be a good economical choice for your organization. Fees are based primarily on the amount of users and you only pay for what you use. You will not have hardware to buy, maintain, and upgrade. The upfront cost is small and most e-mail filtering providers will let you try the service for free initially. Another added benefit to outsourcing your spam control is redundancy. It is important that you choose a provider which has their spam and virus filters collocated at secure Internet data center facilities. Data centers provide redundant network connections and power, so if your email server or net connection is down surprisingly the spam appliance will hold your email until your e-mail server becomes available, minus spam and viruses.

Anti spam technology is consistently improving and the expenses are getting lower. With increased productivity and an extra layer of defense against virus attacks, an anti spam appliance or service is something your business can't afford to be without.
John Tourloukis is the founder of Fast PC Networks an internet consulting company and anti spam and virus filter service firm