An email protection service is an email filtering and virus scanning service that helps protect networks against threats from both outside and inside the network. Typically, an email protection service has a high spam detection rate (above 99.9%), identifies attempts to compromise corporate mail accounts, and prevents emails being sent from corporate mail accounts that could result in the business´s IP address being blacklisted.

An email protection service is also a valuable tool for identifying viruses that may have been inadvertently introduced into a network by an employee. This can happen if, for example, the employee uploads a file from a USB flash drive that has been copied from their malware-infected home computer, or if they connect their malware-infected mobile device to the business´s wireless network. In this respect, outbound email scanning can add an extra layer to a business´s online security strategy.