Reducing Spam with M365

Dealing with the constant barrage of SPAM emails that flood your inbox is frustrating. These unsolicited messages clutter your inbox and ruin your productivity.



Here are a few things to do to reduce spam if you use Microsoft 365.

Step 1: Enter your domain name on mxtoolbox and get a report:

https://mxtoolbox.com/emailhealth/

Step 2: Look for these three low hanging fruit items: SPF, DKIM and DMARC

Step 3: You can either fix these yourself by following any of the instruction sets below or you can find a freelancer on upwork.com to assist. The link for upwork searches for M365 setup to get you to the right professionals.

Here are three different sets of instructions on configuring you M365 for securing your e-mail:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/office-365-security/email-authentication-about?view=o365-worldwide

https://www.dmarcly.com/blog/how-to-set-up-dmarc-dkim-and-spf-in-office-365-o365-the-complete-implementation-guide

https://lazyadmin.nl/office-365/office-365-dmarc/

Again if you have trouble - engage someone with experience via upwork or any kind of freelancer site or your managed service provider. (Although this really should just be included with any service from an MSP in my opinion.)


Step 4: Validate things with the mxtoolbox website and if you want, follow through on some of the other items. I personally do not worry about the following items they call out on M365 hosted e-mail:

SOA Expire Value out of recommended range

May be an open relay. 

If there are other items, do some research or engage with a professional to assist. The documentation available on that website is great and will guide you to solutions if they are available.

For even more in-depth knowledge on these three topics you can visit these pages:

https://www.nslookup.io/learning/dmarc-a-practical-guide/

In addition to setting up those items, another layer of defense against malicious e-mail is to look at some of the other e-mail filtering services. Here is an excellent list: https://www.trustradius.com/email-spam-filter

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