Where is your email being filtered?

A recent article on allspammedup.com talks about a US Appeals court ruling that protesters may legally clog a company’s email system.  The ruling states that by definition, it is legitimate for a person to send letters to a company to, say, complain about its business practices.

Whether the ruling was right or wrong, US law or British, the disruption to Pulte Homes and their ability to do business was significant.  If anything, what could they have done to minimise the disruption or avoid it all together?

Any email filter worth its weight will have the ability to blacklist and block messages by a number of different criteria; the email address of the sender, the IP address of the mail server used to send the message, and also keywords within the email.

This is great though you have to ask the important question: where is my email being filtered?

Depending on your situation (business or domestic user, one computer or many), the often simplest place is to install a spam filter on your computer or laptop.  Desktop security products like ESET Smart Security includes spam filtering as part of the software – turn it on and off you go.

If you’re in a business and have your own email server (Small Business Server maybe?) then it makes sense to run filtering centrally.  Take a product like GFI Mail Essentials and quickly roll out filtering for a group of people without installing software on every PC.

Until you look at the case that went to the US Appeals court, both of those options are perfectly valid with their own merits.  Email comes in, gets identified as bad, and then gets thrown in the bin.

Where they fall down, is that both solutions require you to download the bad messages to your servers/computers BEFORE you can blacklist and block.  Your broadband Internet connection will be running at the pace of a snail, not to mention a slowdown of your computers.

With email filtering and continuity from GFI Max Mail Protection the bad messages are filtered out on the GFI server before they reach your computers.  You lose none of the performance of your Internet connection and your computers keep working without issue.

To learn more about Max Mail you can read more on our website and request a call back from one of our team.  Alternatively you could call us on 0845 004 3025 and ask about an evaluation.