A question we get asked regularly is why use cloud-based spam filtering. There are a number of advantages of offloading the spam filtering from your own server.
Hardware
Accurate spam filtering can be quite process intensive. By offloading the filtering you save processing power on your own server and therefore save hardware costs. Your server can then concentrate on delivering and servicing emails rather than trying to fight spam.
Software
As well as hardware costs, using external filtering means you never have to worry about keeping your own spam filtering up to date. No software updates and no additional software costs.
Security
It is much safer for malicious emails never to reach your network. By having the filtering take place outside of your network ensures that none of those harmful emails has a chance to damage your infrastructure or data.
Accuracy
An external filtering service gathers information from a wide range of emails. In the case of our system, millions of emails are processed daily, so the patterns detected of spam emails is extremely wide and detailed. This data can then be used to train the entire system to improve accuracy.
The above also applies to customers reporting emails as spam. In the rare case where a spam email does pass through our filtering, customers often report this via our control panel. Again, this helps train our system and improves accuracy for all domains we host.
Continuity
As our service acts as an SMTP gateway, it also negates the need for a backup MX service. We provide a clustered setup with multiple MX records meaning it is fully redundant. If your server is ever offline we will hold emails for up to 4 days waiting for your server to become available again.
In the meantime, users can log in to our control panel and view their own emails being held and even reply and send new emails.
Summary
So there are many benefits of using an external cloud-based spam filtering service. With our incoming filtering service costing only £44.99 per year, it offers great value and is quick and easy to set up.