Email remains the most common entry point for cyberattacks targeting businesses, and the sophistication of email-based threats has increased significantly beyond the obvious spam and phishing that early filters addressed. A business email protection solution that was adequate five years ago may be substantially insufficient today. These eight capabilities define what an effective solution actually needs to do.
1. Block Phishing Attempts That Evade Basic Filters
Basic email filters catch known malicious domains, suspicious attachments, and obvious spam. The attacks that cause the most damage have moved well beyond these detectable patterns. Spear phishing attacks that use legitimate-looking domains registered specifically for the attack, business email compromise attempts that impersonate executives or trusted vendors, and zero-day phishing campaigns that have not yet been catalogued in threat databases all evade basic filtering.
An effective email protection solution uses behavioral analysis, sender reputation scoring, and machine learning models trained on large-scale threat intelligence to catch attacks that signature-based filters miss.
2. What Software Options Are There to Protect My Company Emails?
The business email security market includes solutions from Microsoft and Google for organizations using their email platforms, standalone security gateways from vendors like Proofpoint, Mimecast, and Abnormal Security, and integrated security platforms from managed service providers. ConnectWise’s email protection software addresses this landscape specifically for MSPs and their business clients, providing a solution designed to be deployed and managed across multiple client environments efficiently.
The choice between native platform security, standalone security gateways, and managed security solutions depends on the organization’s IT resources, the complexity of their email environment, and whether they have internal security expertise or rely on an MSP.
3. Protect Against Business Email Compromise
Business email compromise, where attackers impersonate executives, vendors, or partners to trick employees into transferring funds or sharing credentials, is one of the highest-cost categories of email-based attack. The FBI has documented billions of dollars in annual losses from BEC attacks, and the attacks often involve no malicious attachments or links that traditional security tools would flag.
Effective BEC protection requires analysis of email header information, behavioral baselines for normal communication patterns, domain spoofing detection, and alerts for anomalous requests that match known BEC patterns.
4. Scan Attachments in Sandboxed Environments
Malicious attachments that evade signature-based detection need to be executed in isolated sandbox environments where their behavior can be observed before they reach the end user. A solution that delivers attachments after only static analysis misses the behavior-based indicators that identify sophisticated malware.
Sandboxing adds latency to email delivery but is necessary for organizations that receive attachments from external parties and cannot rely on all senders using clean systems.
5. Provide URL Rewriting and Time-of-Click Protection
Links in phishing emails often point to legitimate-looking URLs at the time of initial delivery, with the malicious content only activated after delivery or after the initial scan. URL rewriting, where all links in incoming email are replaced with proxied versions that are checked at the time of click rather than only at the time of delivery, closes this gap.
Time-of-click protection that re-evaluates the destination of a link at the moment an employee clicks it catches attacks that use delayed activation.
6. Enforce Email Authentication Protocols
DMARC, DKIM, and SPF are email authentication protocols that allow receiving email servers to verify that an email claiming to come from a specific domain actually originated from infrastructure authorized by that domain. An email protection solution should enforce these protocols on incoming email and help organizations correctly configure them for outbound email.
7. Provide Incident Response Capabilities
When a malicious email is identified after delivery, the ability to retroactively remove it from all recipient mailboxes, identify who else received it, and understand the full scope of the campaign is essential for containing the damage. Solutions that provide post-delivery threat hunting and bulk remediation capabilities reduce the window of exposure.
8. Generate Actionable Threat Intelligence
The security information that email protection generates, including the types of attacks being attempted, the specific domains and sender addresses involved, and the employees being targeted, provides intelligence that informs security awareness training, security policy updates, and the prioritization of other security investments.
