Email Security

The Top 10 Email Spam Filtering Solutions

Discover the top email filtering solutions to filter spam, phishing and malicious emails.

The Top 10 Email Filtering Solutions Include:

Dealing with spam can be frustrating, expensive and time-consuming. For businesses, spam can be seriously harmful, with attackers using spam email to spread malware to business users. For these reasons, it’s vital that any business relying on emails for both internal and external communications has a strong email filtering solution in place to stop spam.

Email filtering solutions categorize all inbound email traffic to determine whether each email is safe and should be delivered, or malicious and should be blocked. Email filters sort emails into categories like spam, grey-mail, viruses and phishing attacks, which determines whether the emails should be delivered to users.

But not all email spam filters offer the same functionality. Some are simplified for email accounts that need to block spam but don’t need the highest level of threat protection, while others are for enterprise users that need strong defenses against cyber-attacks to protect their users and data.

The anti-spam filters we’ve outlined in this article are all cloud-based solutions. This article will cover the best anti-spam email filtering solutions for a range of use cases.

SpamTitan Logo

SpamTitan Email Security is a leading cybersecurity vendor offering advanced solutions for email and web protection, as well as data archiving. SpamTitan Email Security is its robust email spam filtering solution that protects organizations against not only spam emails, but also malicious threats such as phishing attempts, ransomware, viruses, and suspicious URLs. To achieve this, the solution features a built-in secure email gateway (SEG) that blocks 99.9% of inbound threats, as well as double antivirus protection through the use of Bitdefender and Clam AV engines.

SpamTitan Email Security’s feature-packed solution includes a powerful spam-blocking engine that allows whitelisting and blacklisting, as well as inbound email scanning to protect against phishing in real-time, and outbound scanning to help prevent data loss and blacklisting. The solution also includes six built-in Real-Time Blacklists (RBLs), content filtering, and data leak prevention (DLP). Users can easily view reports of emails that have been quarantined from their inboxes, while admins can leverage granular and easily customizable policies.

SpamTitan Email Security is easy to deploy, configure, and use, and integrates particularly well with Office 365—making it a great solution for businesses looking to strengthen their Office 365 email security. We recommend SpamTitan for SMBs and MSPs looking for a low maintenance yet powerful anti-spam solution.

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Abnormal Security Logo

Abnormal Security is a San Francisco, CA, based email security platform that is designed to stop the full spectrum of email threats including phishing, malware, ransomware, alongside spam, and graymail. Email Productivity is Abnormal’s spam and graymail prevention solution. Rather than using static filtration rules, Email Productivity builds organization-specific profiles to provide effective coverage.

Abnormal Security is continually innovating and enhancing their detection model in response to recent trends in spam mail – for instance, their solution can identify spam mail, even if it has passed DKIM and SPF checks. One of the ways that Abnormal can provide such effective coverage is through analyzing the sender-recipient relationship, intent, content, and attachments.

Abnormal’s solution self-learns and adapts to refine protection over time, allowing the solution to tailor itself to each employee and the type of mail they receive. This is particularly effective at detecting graymail. The Abnormal Productivity platform is highly effective and easy to set up, slotting neatly into your existing security stack. We would recommend Abnormal Security Email Productivity for organizations of all sizes that require an adaptive and robust spam prevention solution. 

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Libraesva Logo

Libraesva Email Security is an integrated email security and spam filtering  solution that offers advanced protection for cloud-based email platforms such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. It filters email at both the Gateway and API level to handle multiple email threats, including spam, viruses, and phishing attacks. The solution employs machine learning, artificial intelligence, account takeover protection, and deep URL scanning, along with its Threat Intelligence Engine and Adaptive Trust Engine to detect threats and secure emails.

A key feature of Libraesva Email Security is its Threat Remediation function, which removes potential spam emails and phishing from affected inboxes. Admins can monitor if users have read remediated emails and take necessary actions accordingly. Additionally, the solution offers various layers of security, such as spoofing protection through SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication techniques, protection against malicious files with its QuickSand sandbox defense, and time-of-click URL and protection against malicious URLs.

Libraesva Email Security also addresses risks associated with Business Email Compromise (BEC) by using advanced algorithms to protect against impersonation attacks, such as CEO fraud and whaling. Its integrated dashboard, Threat Analysis Portal (TAP), provides comprehensive data on email attacks, filtering rates, and trends for better visibility. The solution supports easy integration with SIEM systems and other applications, offers end-to-end email encryption, and ensures email continuity in case of platform downtime.

Libraesva is easy to deploy, customizable, and can be operated either on-premise or in the cloud, ensuring the required level of security is achieved swiftly.

Proofpoint Logo

Proofpoint is the world’s largest email security vendor, protecting over 100,000 organizations globally from email threats. Proofpoint Essentials is a market-leading Secure Email Gateway platform for small and midsized organizations to protect their emails. Proofpoint Essentials comprehensively filters malicious emails, including spam, malware and phishing attacks, and gives IT admins granular controls over email messaging. Proofpoint Essentials also includes email archiving and encryption.

Proofpoint offers powerful threat protection features. They offer market-leading spam filtering, with a service level agreement that they will block more than 99% of spam email. Proofpoint also filters content within emails, including adult content and marketing content that they classify as grey-mail. SE Labs found Proofpoint had the highest overall accuracy rating (98%) of all of the email security vendors they tested. Proofpoint saves IT departments time by allowing end users to manage their own email quarantines. Users can view an archive of all their past emails, allow emails to be delivered that Proofpoint has classified as save, and block nuisance senders. Proofpoint Essentials is an ideal platform for businesses looking to protect their emails from spam and malware threats.

Proofpoint have recently extended the features of Proofpoint Essentials to ensure that user’s get the technically advanced protection. These new features include email warning tags added to suspicious emails, as well as one-click message pull which makes it even easier to remove dangerous emails from user’s mailboxes. Proofpoint have enhanced their BEC defense capabilities through working with Supernova. These updates result in a 3x improvement of BEC detection. Another new feature is the predictive URL defense tools which can assess sender behavior and reputation to prioritize the sandboxing of malicious URLs. These features are available as part of Proofpoint’s Business+, Advanced+ and Professional+ packages.

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Avanan Logo

Avanan, acquired by Check Point in 2021, is a cloud-native, ML-powered email and collaboration software solution that protects businesses against threats such as phishing, malware, and account takeover. With native API integrations for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, Avanan enables security teams to quickly and effectively secure their businesses against email threats, as well as threats targeting their collaboration apps such as Slack and Teams.

Avanan’s machine learning engines learn from real emails to become fine-tuned for their tenant. They analyze email communication patterns to create a baseline of “normal” behavior for each user. Avanan then scans inbound, outbound, and internal emails for indicators of malicious intent or account compromise, such as the time and location of sending, the domain, and the email content itself. The platform also offers URL reputation scanning and rewriting. Combined, these features enable Avanan to accurately detect and block even the most sophisticated social engineering attempts, as well as spam and malware. Avanan’s protection also extends beyond email to other popular workplace collaboration and file-sharing apps, giving admins a holistic view of communication security across the board. Some packages also include attachment and link sandboxing, file sanitization, data loss prevention, and encryption, and Avanan also offers email archiving, incident response-as-a-Service, and DMARC as add-ons.

Avanan’s solution is entirely cloud-based, making it highly flexible, scalable, and easy to deploy. While it’s targeted towards larger enterprises, this makes it suitable for organizations of any size. As such, we recommend Avanan for any organization looking to block spam and sophisticated social engineering attacks—and particularly those that want to secure not only their email, but also their other collaboration apps, such as Microsoft Teams and Slack.

Barracuda Essentials Logo

Barracuda Essentials is a comprehensive email protection solution for small and midsized businesses.  Barracuda provides protection against threats like malware and spam, as well as more targeted attacks like spear-phishing and ransomware. The platform also offers email archiving and encryption. Barracuda delivers inbound-email filtering, with URL protection and attachment sandboxing alongside spam filtering. Barracuda also offer automated incident response and remediation, so admins can easily remove malicious emails from inboxes.

Barracuda Essentials offers multiple threat protection features for businesses. Using their enterprise threat intelligence data, Barracuda identifies spam email domains to block spam email and grey-mail. They also offer phishing protection, malware protection and link protection to stop email-borne viruses. Barracuda Essentials is a fully-cloud based email protection platform. Barracuda’s Essentials platform also integrates with Sentinel, which is Barracuda’s advanced platform for stopping phishing and spear-phishing attacks in Office 365. This makes Barracuda a strong option to consider for organizations looking for phishing protection alongside email filtering.

Cisco Logo

Cisco provides inbox protection against threats like malware, business email compromise and phishing attacks. Cisco protects against advanced threats with attachment protection and URL scanning, as well as protecting against outgoing email threats with email encryption and data loss prevention. Cisco is primarily used by mid-sized to large organizations, and can be delivered as an on-premise application or used with cloud based email platforms like Office 365 and G Suite.

Cisco provides powerful spam protection, using Cisco’s Context Adaptive Scanning Engine. This engine examines all the content within an email message such as call to action, domain and message content, and uses this information to block spam emails from being delivered to users. Cisco also use reputation filtering to filter 9-% of spam before it can enter your network. Alongside spam filtering, Cisco provides advanced protection against threats including phishing attacks, domain impersonation and grey-mail, giving end users the functionality to block email senders and remove themselves from nuisance mailing lists.

Trustifi Logo

Trustifi Email Security is a comprehensive cloud-based email security and encryption solution. It provides powerful inbound email protection to secure against spam, malware, phishing and other email threats. The platform filters email from inside the email inbox, so admins can achieve fast, and accurate remediation of email threats.

Trustifi’s Inbound Shield platform comprehensive email scanning to identify and remove sophisticated email threats including phishing, spoofing and impersonation attempts, business email compromise, spam, malware, and more. If a malicious email sender or message is detected, a pop-up in the email inbox warns users against replying, clicking on links, or opening any attachments.

Trustifi assigns every email a safety score, based on email message content including headers, content, links and attachment. End users can also report malicious messages from directly within their email inbox.

Admins can configure the system from the admin console, including setting policies on how rules to automatically block certain email domains or file types. These rules can be applied to all users, or to certain groups. Admins can also generate reports, and set automated audits.

Trustifi is an ideal solution for Office 365 and Google Workspace, deploying via API rather than requiring MX-record redirection. This means service is easy to install and doesn’t require any complex architecture changes. Trustifi is highly recommended for small, mid-sized, and enterprise organizations—particularly those in the legal, financial and healthcare sectors, looking for powerful, multi-layered inbound email protection.

Microsoft Logo

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a cloud-based email filtering service designed to enhance the default protection of the M365 email platform. It safeguards against sophisticated email threats such as phishing, business email compromise, as well as malicious files and attachments. However, thanks to its seamless integration with M365, Defender for Office 365’s protection extends across all M365 apps.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 uses powerful AI engines to automate threat protection, including enforcing anti-phishing policies and anti-malware safeguards across SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. It also checks attachments sent via email or across these applications for safety, protecting users against malware and preventing them from visiting malicious websites. In terms of management, Defender for Office 365 is very easy to set up within a M365 environment, and from its management console admins can access real-time reports and configure advanced threat protection policies and comprehensive investigation and response capabilities.

Microsoft’s substantial investment in Defender for Office 365 has made it an effective and robust choice for small to medium-sized businesses seeking enhanced email security. The solution is highly rated in independent security tests and integrates well with Microsoft’s XDR, SIEM, and Intune solutions, providing a holistic security platform. Any SMB looking for advanced admin controls, policy management, and spam filtering should consider this comprehensive solution, which works seamlessly within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

Mimecast Logo

Mimecast is an enterprise email security provider that provides a high level of protection against email threats. Their solutions leverage AI, machine learning, and social graphing to offer advanced protection against threats such as spam, targeted attacks, and phishing attacks. Mimecast’s solutions can be deployed with or without a gateway depending on customer requirements, and they’re available via two different builds: The Cloud Integrated build is a simplified, cloud-based platform that doesn’t require any MX record changes; the Cloud Gateway build is an advanced platform for more complex email environments.

Mimecast’s Cloud Integrated solution is exclusively for use within Microsoft 365 environments. It’s very quick and easy to deploy, and offers accurate detection of phishing attacks, impersonation, and malicious attachments, links, and QR codes. It also offers 30-day scan back and one-click remediation, and generates warning banners to notify end users of suspicious emails.

The Cloud Gateway offers security for Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments. It offers multi-layered inspection for inbouth and outbound email, protecting against social engineering, homoglyph/homograph deception, and impersonation. It also uses URL rewriting, static file analysis, and sandboxing to protect against malicious attachments, links, and QR codes. Additionally, the solution uses social graphs to identify anomalies in users’ communication patterns and uses AI to generate a warning banner if needed. Finally, it offers integrations with other security tools, such as SIEM, SOAR, TIP, and XDR platforms, and with other solutions offered by Mimecast such as their DMARC management, email backup  and archiving, and security awareness training products.

Overall, we recommend Mimecast’s Cloud Integrated solution for SMBs using Microsoft 365. The Cloud Gateway, on the other hand, is well-suited to any sized organization with any email environment.

The Top 10 Email Spam Filtering Solutions