Secure Your Information Assets Using Office 365 Spam Filter Best Practices
Office 365 users with mailboxes hosted on Microsoft Exchange online have an inbuilt system of spam protection, which automatically works as a default spam filter. It provides advanced protection to the user from spam and malware. The default settings of this can, however, be altered and customized in the Exchange Admin Centre to suit an organization’s requirements better. Here’s getting into more details about what is and what are Office 365 spam filter best practices. Let’s see how Office 365 spam filter works, what options and flexibility it provides, and how it can eliminate junk and ensure the security of your valuable information assets by safeguarding their confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
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Advanced Spam Filtering Using Office 365
Office 365 provides advanced spam filtering that helps the user examine each component of the content received. It affects the spam score by either increasing it or decreasing it and thus helps in identifying spam emails.
Advanced spam filtering targets specific words and parts by correlating them with standard spam components such as HTML tags. These may be pop-ups, links prompting the user for immediate action, etc. which occur commonly in spam emails.
However, chances for false positives cannot be ruled out. Hence, there is a provision to retrieve them from the spam quarantine, which is where discarded emails are stored.
How To Prevent Spam In Office 365?
Spam filtering in Office 365 can take place in the following two ways.
Filtering By Whitelisting
An Office 365 spam filter whitelist can verify the source of the sender before allowing the email into the inbox. All emails sent by the whitelisted user will enter the inbox. Similarly, blacklisting contacts that frequently send spam emails can reduce the influx of useless emails. It is also called connection filtering.
Filtering By Comparison
O365 spam filter often identifies specific characteristics with spam emails and cross-checks them with the other incoming emails. The action taken on the spam emails can vary from blocking the sender permanently to merely discarding the email. Specific languages and regions can also be used as a parameter to filter out spam messages.
Office 365 can also send a message to the sender informing that their sent email was identified as spam email and sent to quarantine instead. The sender can then report to Microsoft if the email was falsely labeled as spam to prevent false positives.
Outbound Spam Office 365
Outbound spam office 365 also contains the provision for filtering outbound messages. This action makes sure that the user is not sending out spam emails to others. This technique is useful if the user’s system gets infected with malware and causes unpredictable actions such as sending out mass unsolicited email.
Office 365 Spam Filter Advanced Options With Spam Scoring
Once enabled office 365 spam filter advanced options, the spam score function sets the spam confidence level (SCL) of a suspected email within a numerical range based on its severity. The scoring method is described below.
- Image Hyperlinks: Under this setting, any email with an image tag will be assigned a higher spam score.
- Numeric URL: The URLs containing numeric characters receive a higher spam score.
- .biz Or .info: Emails containing URL’s to any of the above domains receive a higher spam score.
- Mark As spam: This setting sets the SCL to 9, thus considering it as spam.
- Null Emails: Empty message setting, when enabled, marks emails without a header, subject, body, or attachments automatically as spam.
- Specific Languages: If an email has JavaScript or Virtual Basic Script in HTML, it is marked as spam as they are likely to cause a particular action to occur automatically.
Other advanced spam settings such as object tags, frame tags, and form tags, which usually correspond to a spam email, are also given a higher spam score.
Office 365 Spam Filter Best Practices
Though Office 365 provides a vast number of filter options, the filter settings can vary from user to user. Following are the best practices every user must uniformly follow as Office 365 spam filter best practices.
- Ensure that the Office 365 spam filters meet your specific needs, whether it is an individual or an enterprise.
- Setting an SCL of around five might serve the requirement under most cases.
- Another best practice is to block contacts with a foreign language or region.
Office 365 spam filter best practices are useful guidelines that can avoid junk emails as well as secure the information system of an individual user as well as an organization. Understanding the provisions of Office 365 spam filtering and implementing them right can be highly efficient in having a hassle-free and threat-free online experience.
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