Are you being bombarded with emails from people you have never heard from?
How many of you spend 10 minutes a day filtering through your unwanted emails and deleting them?
If you did that every day you are spending just under an hour a week. Just think how much work you could get done in that time. It is important to manage your time effectively.
If you look in the long run it works out at 200 minutes per month and 2400 minutes per year. 2400 minutes is equivalent to 5 working days based on an 8-hour shift.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could filter out unwanted emails from companies you have never heard of or signed up for?. If so, you should use mail filtering for your emailing system. A mail filter is a type of program that filters and separates emails into different folders based on specified criteria. It provides a way to organize email into different categories automatically, such as separate folders or locations for work, personal, subscriptions and other services.
Another way to understand mail filtering is by imagining that you have your mail manually checked every day before it reaches your mailbox.
Mail filters primarily help in managing and organizing the flow of incoming email messages. They can be classified by criteria such as sender’s email address, subject or message content. Mail filters work when an email is received at the email server. The email server or email software forwards and stores each email based on the filter(s) applied.
For instance, any email addresses which are marked as work will automatically be transferred into the “work” folder. Similarly, for non-configured email addresses, the email program uses its default mail filtering capabilities that usually send email to the primary inbox, while suspicious emails are sent to the junk or spam folder.
If you think back to May 2017 when the NHS and hundreds of businesses were affected by the “wannacry” ransomware attack. It infected over 300,000 computers worldwide. This was due to an email attachment. Mail filtering helps block these types of attachments from reaching the intended destination and stops the end-user from having to make a decision whether to open it or not.
There was a recent email attachment that was being sent around which appeared to be from HMRC. If this email was opened it would lock all your data files. These scenarios are increasing so it is important you act before it is too late.
A simple way to check if you have mail filtering in place is by:
- Going to https://mxtoolbox.com/
- Enter your email domain (This is the bit after the “@” sign) and click “MX Lookup”
- In the results, under “Hostname”, if it just says your email domain, then this would suggest you have No Mail filtering.
This article is written for Sterling Finance (UK) Limited by our guest expert writer Daniel Higginbotham.
Daniel Higginbotham
Director
Tech Savvy Solutions
www.techsavvysolutions.co.uk
