Why Web Hosts Should Filter Outbound Spam

Email is an essential service that most web hosts’ customers expect to work 100% of the time. But how often is your mail traffic getting rejected due to IP blocklisting? How many hours are spent hunting down fraudulent accounts and getting your IP addresses off the blocklists?

The largest webmail providers in the world — AOL Mail, Gmail, Outlook.com and Yahoo! Mail — have long found it necessary to scrutinize the email leaving their networks to prevent users from damaging their reputations.

An outbound spam filter is a business requirement for any service provider, regardless of size. Shared web hosts, dedicated/VPS/cloud service providers, Internet service providers (ISPs) and Web hosts, and mailbox providers — from SMB to global enterprise — all need to filter out spam being sent from within.

Spammers will always find ways to infiltrate networks. Channeling outbound mail through an anti-spam filter is a foolproof way to stop these inevitable spammers from causing problems for your web host business.

Breaking down the outbound spam problem:
Email service grinds to a halt once a network is blocklisted due to spammers hiding within the network. Here’s how the problem unfolds:

• Spammers hijack hosting resources such as email accounts, PHP scripts, or applications like forums and commerce platforms.
• Using these hijacked resources, spammers deliver torrents of unwanted email to recipients.
• Receivers block the IP address of the machine from which the spam is being sent.
• If enough IP addresses in a network are blocklisted, then the entire network can be blocked.
• As IP addresses are blocked, legitimate hosting customers find it difficult to send email reliably. Support tickets overwhelm the hosting provider’s helpdesk.
• In addition to dealing with customer complaints, the hosting provider must now identify and secure the hijacked hosting resources, and then communicate with email receivers to have the affected IP addresses removed from block lists by receivers.
• Email is the backbone of e-commerce, web and mobile applications. Your customers who rely on email for their business will have a low tolerance for unreliable email service.

 Automated solutions
Outbound spam filtering lets you intercept and analyze email from all your servers in order to block the delivery of spam before it harms your IP reputation. It is designed to save valuable employee time by identifying compromised accounts and preventing email delivery problems.

SMTP relay services use outbound spam filtering technology to provide an instant fix for IP blocklisting issues. Simply smart-host from your mail server to ours, and start monitoring your network for spammers.

At MailChannels, we spend a lot of time helping organizations stop outbound spam. If you would like to chat with one of our email security experts, contact us and we’ll point you in the right direction.