Regardless of your industry, the sheer volume of traffic handled by your email server makes security a top priority for any small and medium-sized business. The emails that move across company systems not only carry essential activity and requests but also often contain sensitive corporate or customer data, making it essential to ensure your server email security is current and robust.
With so much riding on your email communications, it’s never a bad idea to reevaluate your email server security once in awhile.
Getting hacked is bad for business
Running an insecure email server presents numerous risks that only multiply if it’s hacked and starts landing spam in subscribers’ inboxes. The main danger is that spam email leads to increased complaints against your IP addresses and web domains, which can strikes a direct hit on subscriber engagement via your legitimate email addresses. In fact, when you send out too much spam, it’s likely that both subscribers and mailbox providers will block your IP address, preventing you from reaching them at all in the future.
You also run the risk that malicious actors who hack your email server will use it to send spam emails to random addresses – not just to your subscribers. If that happens and you hit too many spam traps, your email address could be added to publicly available blacklists before you even realize what’s happened.
Shoring up your email server security
Fortunately, it doesn’t take a huge effort to bolster your email server’s defenses and prevent intrusive and damaging attacks on you and your customers. You can make your server inherently secure by following some simple but important advice from the experts.
One of the most important aspects of email server security is to properly configure the server’s mail relay to restrict access and delivery in the background. By setting up the SMTP protocol, you can specify which IP addresses can act as a relay for your server. The next step is to provide each user with a secure login to ensure their accounts can’t easily be hacked. Finally, you also want to set up encryption to ensure secure connections with POP3 and IMAP authentication and by using SSL and TLS.
Abuse prevention is another way to proactively protect the email server. Be sure to check the publicly available DNS-based blacklists (DNSBLs) and reject any mail from the domains and IP addresses listed there. In addition, check public Spam URI Real-time Blocklists (SURBLs) and set it up to reject messages containing malicious or invalid links. You can also maintain a local blacklist to block IPs that are specifically targeting your server. Finally, be sure to enable outbound mail filtering and secure your web forms with CAPTCHA or reCAPTCHA technology.
Malicious attacks on your email server not only impact business efficiency but they can also cause significant damage to your company’s reputation if it’s used by spam bots. But email server security is often overlooked as a possible avenue for cyber attackers. Is your email server as secure as it can be?
Experienced IT partners like RedNight Consulting are ready to advise you on using current techniques and technology to insulate your email server from intrusive attacks that can damage your online business reputation.