Email Security & Protection
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Fraud Management & Cybercrime
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October 22, 2024
The trend toward remote working over the last several years has bred all kinds of tools intended to help us improve productivity and facilitate easier, faster digital communications with colleagues. So why does workplace productivity still feel impossible to achieve?
See Also: Live Webinar | Agency Cyber Incident Response Team (CIRT) Playbook
Unfortunately, email—one of the most integral vehicles for business communication—is also one of the biggest drains on employee time and energy. According to data from Microsoft, employees spend as much as 8.8 hours each week checking and responding to email. And while many email communications are essential, one recent report found that nearly half of all emails are spam or other unwanted mail.
And while that may not sound like a security team problem, it becomes one when end users start reporting every unwanted email as an attack—taking valuable time away from the SOC, which must remediate and respond to those user reports. So how can security teams help to manage email overload? The key is to banish it from their inboxes.
What is Graymail and How Does it Affect Productivity?
Graymail is a type of spam that’s harmless (from a security standpoint) but largely irrelevant and rarely useful, such as promotional messages and marketing ads. Even though users may have opted to receive communications from graymail senders at some point, not all of a sender’s emails provide immediate value to the recipient. Instead, they form yet another layer of digital clutter to manage.
Sifting through graymail can be a meticulous process, siphoning away employees’ limited mental bandwidth. Plus, the promotional nature of graymail often makes them enticing and distracting—pulling away employees’ focus and interrupting vital deep work.
In addition, large amounts of graymail make it harder to find important and time-sensitive emails, resulting in delayed responses, stalled decisions, and bottlenecked projects. And with Abnormal Security data showing that executives receive 230% more graymail than other employees, it’s clear that the people whose input is often critical in resolving concerns or advancing projects are also the most bogged down.
How to Solve the Graymail Issue and Reclaim Productivity
Unfortunately, graymail is a tricky problem to solve. While traditional spam filters are often designed to catch unsolicited emails or communications from senders on blocklists, graymail usually falls outside these rules. Additionally, legacy solutions like email quarantines or spam digest summaries are cumbersome for employees and create even more headaches for IT teams, who have to field user tickets about deliverability issues and manage blocklists and allowlists. Plus, every user defines graymail differently; a newsletter or product announcement that’s integral to one user’s work may be junk to another.
So how do you solve the problem? The best way to address graymail is to use an AI-powered solution that adapts to each employee’s unique email habits—learning which promotional messages they interact with most and which they’d prefer to deal with later and then moving graymail to its own dedicated folder within the mailbox. This ensures a streamlined email experience for all employees while eliminating the hassle of maintaining allowlists or blocklists.
AI-Powered Email Productivity in Action
What does it look like to use an AI-powered email productivity solution? Here are a couple examples of how implementing adaptive graymail protection can boost email efficiency and help employees claw back their time.
Like many companies, printer and imaging equipment manufacturer Lexmark struggled with a deluge of graymail. In fact, the organization’s CISO waded through hundreds of these messages in his own inbox every day. To finally get a handle on this challenge, the Lexmark security team adopted automated graymail detection and remediation, and today, the company consistently saves more than 1,000 hours per month across the employee base.
Educational consulting firm EAB saw similar productivity gains after adopting AI-powered graymail protection. Today, EAB employees save hundreds of hours each month by automatically filtering graymail into a separate “Promotions” folder, where users can still access those messages whenever they want. In the first 90 days of using the solution, EAB employees saved nearly 2,000 hours of time on managing their inboxes.
The fact of the matter is that whether you love it or hate it, email isn’t going away anytime soon. As long as it continues to be a primary tool for communication—and I expect it will be, far into the future—sorting unwanted mail will continue to be a problem. The organizations who can intelligently automate this process will be in the best position to optimize their employees’ productivity amid growing volumes of digital clutter.
Abnormal Security is transforming email security and productivity with its AI-native solution and API-based architecture. Learn why over 2,000 organizations trust our approach.
