As a Managed Service Provider (MSP), adding value to your customer’s accounts is key to your sales and retention efforts. That’s why we’re happy to provide our clients with another tool to help strengthen your client offerings. It’s called Graymail Protection and its superpower is making companies more productive. Let us explain.
What is Graymail?
Even if you’ve never heard the term ‘graymail’, you’re probably more familiar with it than you want to be. We all are. Simply because we’re surrounded by plenty of it.
Graymail is a form of bulk email that at some point we opted to receive.
If you think about your personal email, graymail includes emails about new movie releases from your streaming services or maybe donation requests from your alma mater. But graymail also crowds our work inboxes. Examples include:
Webinar invitations
Newsletters
Conference updates
Social media messaging
Investment news
Vendor marketing
Industry alerts and announcements
Partner messaging
Transactional emails
Surveys
Policy updates
Competitor news
Promotions
...and more.
5 Big Problems with Graymail
Graymail poses problems for employers, employees, IT teams, and more. Here are five of the main problems with graymail.
- It’s a distractor. Work distractions come in many forms and when an employee turns their attention to a graymail message with a catchy subject line, they immediately stop concentrating on the work at hand.
- It’s a productivity pilferer. Between 2.5 and 3 hours are lost every workday due to distractions.1 This hampers productivity and results in lost time, work, and revenue.
- It’s a quality crusher. Distractions like graymail impact the caliber of an employee’s work. In a study conducted by George Mason University, a team of psychological scientists found that interruptions make it difficult to reorient ourselves to the initial task and as a result, the break in concentration degrades the overall quality of people’s work.2
- It’s difficult to isolate. Most email security platforms are designed to filter out spam. However, graymail doesn’t meet all the criteria to technically be spam since it isn’t completely unsolicited.
- It’s a known phishing risk. Cybercriminals are notorious for cleverly disguising phishing links and malware inside of marketing messages. Since graymail is not unsolicited, many Secure Email Gateways (SEGs) and similar so-called security systems mistakenly give the green light to malicious graymail.
Graymail is Growing
Email marketing has proven to be more profitable than any other channel. In fact, for every $1 U.S. companies spent on email marketing in 2022, a whopping $47.80 was earned. What does this mean? That email marketing isn’t going anywhere. In fact, one popular email marketing platform saw a 42.3% increase in the number of emails sent in 2022, versus the prior year.
The Smart Solution is INKY’s Graymail Protection
Isolating graymail isn’t something everyone can do. It takes intelligent machine learning algorithms and delivery settings to dynamically detect and remediate graymail. INKY’s Graymail Protection examines message features like email headers, links, body text, and more to determine if the Graymail threat category should be applied. And as always, INKY checks for other threat types including phishing and malware. That means when employees do review their graymail, it’s safe to do so.
If you’d like to learn more about INKY and services like Graymail Protection, now is a great time. Request an online demonstration today.
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INKY is an award-winning, behavioral email security platform that blocks phishing threats, prevents data leaks, and coaches users to make smart decisions. Like a cybersecurity coach, INKY signals suspicious behaviors with interactive email banners that guide users to take safe action on any device or email client. IT teams don’t face the burden of filtering every email themselves or maintaining multiple systems. Through powerful technology and intuitive user engagement, INKY keeps phishers out for good. Learn why so many companies trust the security of their email to INKY. Request an online demonstration today.
1Source: www.zippia.com/employer/workplace-distraction-statistics/
2Source: https://www.omnisend.com/blog/email-sms-push-marketing-ecommerce-2023/