Email Gateway Definition
The simple email gateway definition is that they are a type of email servers that protect the user’s internal email servers. An email gateway of an organization is the email server through which every incoming or outgoing email passes; these servers act as gateways into the email platform of the user organizations. An email gateway does not host any user email inbox. Instead, it analyzes and inspects all inbound emails before letting them through to a user’s email inbox.
An enterprise does not have control over what emails are directed towards their server; however, when these emails reach their server, they can take actions on whether to let them through or otherwise. This is where terms like email gateway solutions, email security, email filtering service, email security gateways, and encryption email gateways come into use. The words are meant to describe the safeguards put in place at the email servers to prevent outside threats and attacks to mailboxes.
How Email Gateway Works
Email gateways analyze emails for threat. If they consider the inspected emails as clean, they send them to the internal server or service for the user to receive. If they believe the emails as spam or containing a threat, they quarantine those on the email gateway itself.
‘Email gateway services’ is an umbrella term that can include several measures put in place at the email gateway to counter attacks by hackers. As such, how email gateway services work also differs from one type to the other.
Email Encryption Gateway
This type of service encrypts outbound emails and decrypts inbound emails. An email encryption gateway secures all outgoing emails leaving the user’s network by encrypting them. It also decrypts all incoming emails so that they can be scanned for viruses and malicious contents.
Email Filtering Services
Email filters process emails by their contents to organize them according to specified criteria. Many types of email filters exist – word-based, list-based, Bayesian filters, heuristic filters, etc. An email filtering service can be employed with other types of solutions to have secure and robust email gateway services.
Secure Analysis
Some advanced email gateway services are even capable of deploying sophisticated analysis methods to detect threats. They do so by machine learning algorithm and sandboxing so that they can analyze even potentially harmful contents without any threat to the user’s system.
Benefits Of Email Gateway Services
One cannot comprehend the type of attacks that they will face in the future, in regards to the emails from hackers and phishing attackers. Using email gateway services that practically block any threat to the organization is a massive benefit to the entire company.
Keep all the emails encrypted
This is one of the best security features that such gateways perform. Even if the primary server gets accessed by a hacker, the external encryption provided by these gateways prevents the hacker from accessing any email that is exchanged. There are numerous attacks in the form of malicious emails, and there is a possibility of many of them to be successful, which is why an extra precaution always comes in handy in such situations.
Fill the email security gaps
Installing software such as an anti-virus to block outside threat isn’t enough for many reasons. One of these reasons is that the attackers design such programs that can easily bypass such software. This is where email gateway services come into play. The gateways prevent any attacks to even pass through the server because they are designed differently as compared to other email security software.
Cost-efficient, hassle-free countermeasures
The email gateway services are cost-efficient and hassle-free countermeasures that organizations can deploy against threats from emails. There are even email gateways free of cost in the market. If the requirements of an organization are not very high, these free gateway services can also perfectly serve the purpose.
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