What is Spam?

Spam refers to unwanted or unsolicited or irrelevant messages, often sent in bulk, typically for advertising, phishing or spreading malwares. It is commonly associated with email but can appear in text messages, social media posts or comments.

What is Anti-Spam?

Anti-Spam refers to measures, techniques, and tools designed to detect, prevent and filter out unwanted or unsolicited messages, commonly known as spam.

When you want to create anti-spam policy, there are two policies you need to implement: the inbound policy and the outbound policy.

Inbound anti-spam policy (Incoming Emails): Applies to emails sent from external sources to recipients within your organization. Filters spams, phishing, malware and other malicious emails before they reach users’ inboxes.

Outbound anti-spam policy (Outgoing Emails): Applies to emails sent from your organization to external recipients. Prevents compromised accounts from sending spam and protects your domain reputation.

These policies help maintain email security, user protection and domain reputation by ensuring only legitimate emails are sent and received.

Step-by-step process of Creating Anti-Spam Policy.

First Implement the Inbound policy. To do this, Login to Microsoft Defender Portal, click on show all, navigate to Email & collaboration and click on the dropdown, select policies & rules and click on Threat policies.

Next, Click on Anti-Spam, click on create policy, click on Inbound.

Next Setup the Inbound policy, give it a name, description (optional) and click on next.

Under Users, Group and Domain, as usual, input your domain and click on next.

Setup the Bulk email threshold and properties. It is always advisable to set it to 5 with is like the middle. This will help balance the filtering. If it is too high, all the emails maybe flag as spam and if it is too low, all the emails will through without any filtering.

Spam properties set the Spam scores. You can choose to set it to Off, On or Test. In this project, it is set to On and click on Done.