Top Five Mistakes Businesses Make Protecting E-mail

Protecting email from spam, viruses, hackers, and inappropriate content can affect the responsiveness of a company's system, the productivity of its employees and its financial and legal positions. To help, here is a look at the top five mistakes companies make when protecting their email:

1) Desktop software only protection-

Desktop software shouldreally be considered the last line of defense. It's controlled by the end-user and can be disabled or not updated frequently enough. Furthermore, by letting unwanted spam and virus traffic flow into a company and all the way to the desktop before itís filtered out can burden the internal network.

2) No outgoing protection-

Many viruses can get sent from a company to business partners, suppliers, even customers. Content filtering can reduce the risk, prevent outbound spam, avoid sensitive information leaks and filter out inappropriate content such as profanity or harassment.

3) No traffic reporting or recording-

Reporting on messaging traffic is critical for businesses to identify large volume email senders, employees talking to competitors, and other forms of abuse. In some industries reporting and recording are important for regulatory compliance and addressing concerns of corporate liability.

4) Security software running on insecure platforms-

Widely used operating systems such as Windows can be hacked.

5) Effectiveness and reliability-

The email security solution needs to offer high "catch-rates" to stop spam and virus threats, as well as virtually zero false-positives so no critical email gets accidentally discarded.

Additionally, the system needs built-in reliability and redundancy for recovering from power loss and ensuring no critical messages are lost or corrupted.