Why Do I Need A Spam Filter?

Great Question! Spam is one of the biggest problems on the Internet and in every business in the world today. Did you know that 97-99% of your email traffic is spam? It's true. As a result, just keeping spam off your computer network is a fulltime job.

Here's how email flows when spam filtering is done on the server (by Exchange, for example, or some 3rd party program):

Here's how a hardware-based spam filter works:

And Here's how a service-based spam filter works:

Here's What's Going On

Email traffic comes into your network. Literally 97-99% of it is Spam. Your firewall sees it as email, and email is allowed. So the firewall lets it in. Without a device to stop the spam, your email server has to decide whether to accept or reject all that email. Whatever it accepts, it then has to "open" it to do more spam filtering. It throws most of the emails away and passes the rest on to the users.

With a spam filtering device, all that work is done before email gets to the server. You reduce your server's workload by 97% or more!

Now, let's look at the video. This is one minute of spam filtering on an anti-spam device. As you can see, there are over a hundred connection attempts. If you look carefully you'll see that one legitimate email goes through. This screen capture was taken about 6:00 AM on a weekday on a low-volume email system.

Once you're connected to the Internet, you are a target!

What you see here is the monitoring window for the spam filter. We type "W" to watch activity. After that you have about 55 seconds of activity. As you can imagine, during the business day this would go way up.

Service-Based Spam Filtering: Exchange Defender

Hardware based spam filters are great. But they're not as scalable as a service. With Exchange Defender, all of your email is filtered before it hits your network. The spam fight is really a sort of arms race: The good guys and the bad guys are constantly trying to outwit each other. With Exchange Defender, the good guys have a series of massively redundant servers to filter any amount of email.

Hardware devices all have limits. When your email goes from 10,000 spam a day to 50,000 spam a day, you will need a second hardware-based spam filter. But if you're using Exchange Defender, the filter will simple grow to accommodate the increase.

Other Considerations

In addition to putting a strain on your systems, software-based spam filter requires ongoing labor. The bad guys keep making up new rules and the spam software has to be maintained properly or the filters become less effective over time. With a hardware-based spam filter, all updates happen regularly and there's no danger that an update will bring down your email server.

For more information, or to schedule a demonstration at your office, please call us at 916-928-0888 or email sales@kpenterprises.com.

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