Email filtering and sensitive content protection on Exchange Server

Nowadays, most of us can hardly imagine living without using e-mail. Certainly, electronic mail has replaced traditional mail in many cases, becoming an efficient tool for communication and marketing. We use e-mail every day, starting from personal messages and finishing on purely business-related matters: job applications, subscriptions, reservations, transactions, promotional vouchers, invoices, on-line shopping, etc. A great number of important and confidential information flows from one inbox to another one and we can never be sure of its safety.

Now, let’s imagine a large company, where this number increases along with the series of promotional materials, newsletters, business offers, job enquires, clients complaints, support requests, inter-departments conversations and plain rubbish messages with no value for the company. How can we possibly manage such a mass of information and keep all the messages in order and properly secured?

A smart email filter seems to be a perfect solution for this problem.

Email filtering is a function build in some email management programs. Its role is to monitor and control contents of messages coming into and out of the organization as well as between its employees.  The content filtering strategy is up to an administrator who can customize it according to his company specific needs. CodeTwo Exchange Rules Pro is an example of a very advanced email management system. It contains a dictionary of typical email phrases, so the administrator assigns selected words or sentences to a specific category, e.g., Support, Spam or Confidential Information. Then, based on the ascribed actions for the certain categories, the program adequately reroutes, encodes or blocks the messages.

What are the advantages of email filtering on Exchange?

Security of the confidential information in the messages.

Taking into consideration the frequency of the financial transactions and business deals we do via e-mail, the security of this information has become a serious issue for many companies. Remove sensitive content feature in CodeTwo Exchange Rules Pro gives this desired option of encoding or removing selected pieces of information. It usually applies to credit cards numbers or personal identifiers. See an example below:

Protection from unwanted or inappropriate content.

In the above-mentioned dictionary of CodeTwo Exchange Rules Pro, we can find a full list of phrases typical for Spam, Sexual Content and even Offensive Language category. They are specially prepared to help an administrator sift out the valuable information from rubbish messages which only distract employees, overload inboxes and might contain viruses. In case of such messages, appropriate actions are performed: e.g., vulgar phrases might be replaced with another word that is predefined by an administrator or the entire message can be blocked.

Email flow management and sorting messages.

Sometimes in various large enterprises incoming message initially land in wrong inboxes, e.g., Marketing receives support requests and Technical Support finds in inbox an invitation to business conference. Email filtering might turn out be a helpful tool for proper email segregation. Based on specific keywords in a subject or body of message, administrator can implement a procedure of e-mail rerouting using actions, such as forward, block, add Auto-responder, change the subject etc. So, e.g., a copy of message containing a sentence: I would like to apply for a job at your company, would go straight away to the Recruitment Department.

CodeTwo Exchange Rules Pro with the ‘Sensitive Content Filter’ feature.

Sensitive content filtering and sensitive content removing features of CodeTwo Exchange Rules Pro are based on the build-in dictionary that contains a lot of categories and phrases. They can be easily modified by an administrator. Each phrase can be defined with a score ranging from 5 to 100. If the phrase is high enough, the message is classified as belonging to a given category. The dictionary also allows defining a type of each phrase – if it’s Exact Phrase, Wildcard or Regular Expression.

It means that the admin has a full control over the filtering strategy. Its successful implementation, in the light of all above facts, seems to be essential for a stable and efficient operating of every institution.

Find out more about CodeTwo Exchange Rules Pro features from a short video presentation.