Graymail vs. Spam vs. Phishing
Graymail and spam differ fundamentally in their nature and intent. While graymail consists of emails that were initially solicited but have since become unwanted, spam, or junk email, is an unsolicited email by definition.
The ways in which your contact details are collected also differ:
- Graymail. You often hand over your email address to graymail creators at some point – either by downloading resources, or signing up to an overly-enthusiastic newsletter.
- Spam. It often relies on indirectly buying or outright stealing your contact details. Spam is then mass-distributed for commercial purposes, irrelevant to most recipients, and holds little to no value for them.
While spam and graymail messages are both trying to sell you something, phishing emails, a cyber threat, represent a wholly different motive. Phishers actively leverage your contact details to steal further information, like passwords or vulnerable services you rely on.
Does Graymail Make Phishing Worse?
While they are different messages with differing aims, graymail inadvertently contributes to the effectiveness of phishing attacks. This is because they can blur the line between the two genres. When users are bombarded with bulk email messages, they may grow desensitized and lower their vigilance, making them more prone to falling victim to phishing attempts.
Graymail detection is a cornerstone of modern email security. The reality of supply chain attacks makes graymail even riskier:
if a graymail sender’s systems are compromised, the valid email addresses and data they store are able to be further exploited. This stolen information could then be weaponized in phishing campaigns, particularly since the compromised email service provider would give greater context for spear phishing attacks.
This would then add credibility to the phishing attempts, increasing their likelihood of malware deployment.
Enterprise Strategies to Mitigate Graymail
Since graymail is essentially made up of stale marketing messages, it’s worth sharing the responsibility here.
While users can deploy strategies to reduce graymail, marketing teams also need to have a solid sundowning approach to users who stop engaging. This reduces graymail from its source.
As a Sender
To manage graymail effectively, a marketing team can use an automated suppression system that automatically excludes contacts who have shown no recent engagement with promotional emails.
This process relies on tracking key engagement actions, such as opening an email or clicking a link within it.
Contacts should be identified as unengaged if they have either never interacted with a marketing email or have ignored the last several sent to them. Built-in email filtering these unengaged recipients out does more than improve security: it drastically improves marketing metrics as well.
As a Recipient:
End-users’ inboxes have historically represented a major risk to enterprise security: it’s why visibility is one of the defining solutions to issues such as graymail. While Check Point provides market-leading inbox protection, end-users can use a few limited approaches for the short-term.
For one, almost every email inbox provider offers a degree of spam filtering.
These rely on Machine Learning models that identify and classify graymail by analyzing whether recipients interact with the unwanted emails they receive. For instance, if an end-user subscribes to an external mailing list on their corporate email account and later stops engaging, the emails are eventually placed into the spam folder. Some email providers collate these into the promotions tab, which helps with inbox organization – but not with security.
The weeks – or sometimes months – it takes for graymail to be taken out of a primary inbox gives attackers ample opportunity to slip in unnoticed.
Alongside basic inbox automation, end-users can be given email security training to help them understand the risks behind the different communication channels they may be exposed to.
Keep Inboxes Safe with Check Point
It’s no longer just public-facing employees that are at risk of inbox-bound attacks. Wholly-internal managers and executives need to keep close eyes on tools, shows, and developments within their industries: this almost always relies on a constant flow of newsletters, white papers, and more.
This is twice as true for the teams that are externally-facing.
Harmony Email & Collaboration offers immediate phishing protection thanks to Natural Language Processing (NLP) that assesses a message’s legitimacy before the end-user is exposed to the message contents.
This is coupled with in-depth URL assessment and malware identification, allowing for sophisticated attack prevention right at the edge of your organization. Explore how Harmony protects all email messages and collaboration suites like Teams, Slack, and more with a demo.
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