Your Guide to Email Security Solutions Tailored for Every Business

Email is where business gets done, and where many cyberattacks begin. A single phishing message, malicious link, infected attachment, or convincing impersonation attempt can disrupt operations, expose sensitive data, and put users under pressure to make the wrong click at the wrong time.

That is why choosing the right email security package matters. Proofpoint Essentials gives small and mid-sized businesses access to cloud-based protection built on Proofpoint’s enterprise-class security technology, with packages designed for different levels of risk, compliance, continuity, and operational need.

This guide breaks down each Proofpoint Essentials package in plain language, explains what the major features do, and helps you understand where each package fits. It also shows, in a practical and understated way, how Vircom helps MSPs and IT teams manage Proofpoint Essentials more effectively, efficiently, and profitably.

What is Proofpoint Essentials?

Proofpoint Essentials is a cloud-based email security platform designed for small and medium-sized businesses. Built on Proofpoint’s enterprise-class security technology, it combines threat detection, data protection, continuity, and archiving options in packages that can be matched to different security needs and budgets.

Each package is designed for a different level of risk, operational maturity, and compliance need. Business provides a cost-effective foundation, Advanced adds stronger protection for sensitive communications and unknown threats, and Professional adds archiving for organizations with retention or discovery requirements. The Plus versions build on those packages with faster remediation and stronger protection against post-delivery threats.

Overview of Proofpoint Essentials Packages

Proofpoint Essentials offers six main packages:

• Standard packages: Business, Advanced, and Professional
• Plus packages: Business Plus, Advanced Plus, and Professional Plus

Security Awareness phishing simulations and trainings can be added to any package.
All packages include robust management features.
Vircom enhances any package with exclusive added-value features.

Vircom’s recommendation: For most organizations, Vircom recommends Advanced Plus because it includes the security capabilities businesses need most, including Attachment Sandboxing, Advanced BEC Defense, Email Warning Tags, and automated remediation through One-Click Message Pull. If email archiving is required for retention, compliance, or discovery needs, Professional Plus is the recommended choice. If Advanced Plus is outside budget, the other packages can still provide strong value when matched to the organization’s risk profile, compliance needs, and available budget.

Which package should you choose?

Need	Recommended package	Why
Basic SMB protection	Business	Covers core inbound, outbound, URL, attachment, DLP, and continuity needs.
Basic protection plus post-delivery remediation	Business Plus	Adds One-Click Message Pull and Predictive URL Defense.
Encryption, sandboxing, and stronger threat protection	Advanced	Adds Email Encryption, Attachment Sandboxing, and Social Media Protection.
Best overall security and value for most organizations	Advanced Plus	Combines Advanced security with Plus remediation, BEC protection, and user warning capabilities.
Archiving required	Professional	Adds email archiving for retention, compliance, discovery, and long-term access.
Archiving plus strongest remediation and protection	Professional Plus	Includes Professional archiving plus the full Plus feature set.

Why buy Proofpoint Essentials through Vircom? You get the same Proofpoint Essentials protection, enhanced with Vircom’s MSP-focused operating layer: multi-tenant visibility, automation, Outlook Add-In, Microsoft 365 monitoring, PSA billing integrations, and expert email-security support.

Business Package

The Business package provides a cost-effective foundation for email security, including inbound and outbound filtering, URL Defense, Attachment Defense, Data Loss Prevention, and Email Continuity. It is well suited to small offices, start-ups, and organizations that need reliable baseline protection without moving into advanced sandboxing, encryption, or archiving requirements.

Key Features of the Business Package:

• Inbound Filtering (anti-spam, anti-virus, Impostor protection)
• Outbound Filtering
• URL Defense
• Attachment Defense
• Data Loss Prevention
• Email Continuity

Business Plus Package

Business Plus builds on the Business package by adding tools that help administrators respond faster when threats are detected after delivery. It is designed for organizations that want the core protection of Business plus additional remediation and link-protection capabilities through One-Click Message Pull and Predictive URL Defense.

Key Features of the Business Plus Package:

• All of the features of the Business package
• One-Click Message Pull
• Predictive URL Defense

Advanced Package

Advanced builds on Business by adding Email Encryption, Attachment Sandboxing, and Social Media Protection. It is best for organizations that need stronger protection against unknown attachments, sensitive communications, and more advanced email-based threats.

Key Features of the Advanced Package:

• All of the features of the Business package
• Email Encryption
• Attachment Sandboxing
• Social Media Protection

Advanced Plus Package

Advanced Plus is Vircom’s recommended package for most organizations because it combines the advanced security capabilities of the Advanced package with the Plus features that help teams respond faster and reduce user risk. It includes key protections such as Attachment Sandboxing, Advanced BEC Defense, Email Warning Tags, Predictive URL Defense, and One-Click Message Pull, making it a strong fit for organizations that want comprehensive email security without adding archiving.

Key Features of the Advanced Plus Package:

• All of the features of the Advanced package
• One-Click Message Pull
• Predictive URL Defense
• Advanced BEC Defense
• Email Warning Tags

Professional Package

Professional includes the capabilities of Advanced and adds email archiving for organizations with retention, legal discovery, compliance, or long-term access requirements.

Key Features of the Professional Package:

• All of the features of the Advanced package
• Email Archiving

Professional Plus Package

Professional Plus is the most complete Proofpoint Essentials package described here. It is the recommended choice for organizations that need everything included in Advanced Plus plus email archiving for retention, compliance, legal discovery, or long-term access requirements. For organizations that do not require archiving, Advanced Plus typically provides the strongest balance of security coverage and value.

Key Features of the Professional Plus Package:

• All of the features of the Professional package
• One-Click Message Pull
• Predictive URL Defense
• Advanced BEC Defense
• Email Warning Tags

Key features available in standard packages

• Inbound Filtering
• Outbound Filtering

• URL Defense
• Attachment Defense
• Data Loss Prevention
• Continuous updates to counter evolving threats

Inbound Filtering

What It Does: Inbound Filtering scans incoming messages for spam, phishing, viruses, malware, and other unwanted content before they reach users’ inboxes.

How It Helps:

Reduces exposure to phishing scams, malicious attachments, and other inbound email threats.

Keeps spam and unwanted bulk email out of inboxes so users can stay focused and productive.

Adds a protective layer at the email gateway before risky messages reach internal systems.

Outbound Filtering

What It Does: Outbound Filtering reviews messages leaving the organization to help enforce security policies, prevent abuse, and reduce the risk of sensitive or malicious content being sent externally.

How It Helps:

Protects domain and sender reputation by helping prevent spam or malicious content from being sent through your email system.

Helps detect and stop outbound messages that contain sensitive, inappropriate, or risky information.

Supports compliance by applying organizational filtering policies to outgoing email.

URL Defense

What It Does: URL Defense analyzes links in emails and checks destinations at click time, helping block access to malicious or suspicious websites.

How It Helps:

Protects users from phishing links, fake login pages, and websites that host malware.

Helps reduce risk from links that become malicious after the email has already been delivered.

Gives users safer access to links by blocking dangerous destinations before they load.

Attachment Defense

What It Does: Attachment Defense scans email attachments for known malware, suspicious patterns, and other indicators of risk before they reach users.

How It Helps:

Helps prevent users from opening attachments that contain ransomware, spyware, or other harmful software.

Stops known attachment-based threats before they can affect users or systems.

Reduces exposure to risky files while helping legitimate attachments continue to flow.

Data Loss Prevention

What It Does: Data Loss Prevention (DLP) helps protect sensitive information by scanning outbound email for confidential data, such as personally identifiable information, financial records, payment-card data, and proprietary business information. When a message violates predefined policies, DLP can block, quarantine, or flag it for administrator review.

How It Helps:

Reduces data-loss risk: Helps prevent accidental or intentional exposure of confidential information.

Supports compliance: Helps organizations enforce email policies for regulatory and industry requirements such as GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and PCI DSS.

Minimizes human error: Reduces the risk of employees sending sensitive information to the wrong recipient or outside approved channels.

Customizable protection: Allows organizations to define policies and rules based on their industry, risk profile, and internal data-handling requirements.

Email Continuity

What It Does: Email Continuity helps keep email available during outages or technical failures. With capabilities such as Emergency Inbox, Spooling, and Instant Replay, users can continue accessing critical messages even when the primary email service is unavailable.

How It Helps:

Reduces downtime impact: Keeps employees connected during outages so critical communications are not missed.

Prevents message loss: Securely queues incoming mail and delivers it once normal service is restored.

Supports recovery: Lets users retrieve and replay recent messages when needed.

Maintains access: Provides a web-based emergency inbox so users can continue working from any location during an outage.

Email Encryption

What It Does: Email Encryption helps protect sensitive messages by securing email content in transit and limiting access to intended recipients.

How It Helps:

Supports privacy requirements: Helps organizations protect sensitive communications in line with regulatory, contractual, or industry expectations.

Protects sensitive content: Reduces the risk of personal, financial, or confidential business information being exposed to unauthorized parties.

Simplifies secure communication: Helps users send protected messages without adding unnecessary complexity to everyday workflows.

Attachment Sandboxing

What It Does: Attachment Sandboxing analyzes unknown or suspicious attachments in a secure virtual environment to detect hidden malware, zero-day threats, and other risky behavior before files reach users.

How It Helps:

Detects advanced threats: Identifies malicious files that may evade traditional signature-based antivirus tools.

Improves zero-day protection: Helps defend against new, polymorphic, or previously unseen malware.

Balances security and productivity: Helps block dangerous attachments while allowing legitimate files to continue reaching users.

Social Media Protection

What It Does: Social Media Protection helps monitor and secure branded social media accounts from misuse, compromise, unauthorized activity, or posts that could expose the organization to reputational or security risk.

How It Helps:

Protects brand reputation: Monitors for suspicious or compromised activity on official accounts.

Improves visibility: Alerts teams to potential account takeover, unauthorized access, or malicious posting activity.

Reduces fraud risk: Helps prevent attackers from using corporate social channels for phishing, scams, or impersonation.

Archiving

What It Does: Archiving stores email securely in a searchable, tamper-resistant environment to support retention, compliance, legal discovery, and long-term access requirements.

How It Helps:

Supports retention requirements: Helps organizations preserve email for regulatory, legal, or internal governance needs.

Improves search and access: Makes historical emails easier to find through secure search tools.

Simplifies discovery: Helps administrators locate relevant messages for audits, investigations, or legal matters.

Enables legal hold: Allows selected messages to be preserved when they are related to legal or compliance obligations.

Additional features available in Plus packages

• One-Click Message Pull
• Predictive URL Defense
• Advanced BEC Defense
• Email Warning Tags

One-Click Message Pull

What It Does: One-Click Message Pull lets administrators remove suspected or confirmed malicious emails from user inboxes quickly and centrally.

How It Helps:

Fast remediation: Reduces exposure by allowing IT teams to act as soon as a threat is identified.

Lower risk: Prevents users from opening dangerous messages that may have reached their inboxes.

Time savings: Enables bulk message removal across an organization without manually accessing individual mailboxes.

Predictive URL Defense

What It Does: Predictive URL Defense uses machine learning and AI models to analyze links in real time, helping detect both known malicious sites and emerging threats before they become widespread.

How It Helps:

Proactive protection: Helps guard against newly created phishing campaigns and compromised sites that may not have been known at delivery time.

Click-time protection: Rechecks URLs when users click, providing an additional layer of defense after delivery.

Defense against evasive threats: Blocks links that attackers change or weaponize after the email has already been delivered.

Advanced BEC Defense

What It Does: Advanced BEC Defense helps detect and block targeted impersonation attacks, including messages that appear to come from executives, suppliers, or other trusted contacts.

How It Helps:

Impersonation protection: Identifies messages that attempt to imitate trusted people or organizations.

Advanced identity analysis: Uses machine learning to evaluate sender identity, message patterns, tone, and other signals associated with targeted fraud.

Reduced financial and data-loss risk: Helps prevent wire fraud, invoice scams, credential theft, and other BEC-related attacks.

Email Warning Tags

What It Does: Email Warning Tags display visible banners inside messages to help users quickly recognize potentially risky email. These customizable tags can highlight gray-area messages, such as emails from newly created domains, spoofed senders, or suspicious content.

How It Helps:

Real-time awareness: Gives users clear visual cues when a message deserves extra caution.

Customizable warnings: Allows administrators to define warning rules based on organizational policies, sender behavior, or threat signals.

Safer user behavior: Encourages employees to pause, review, and avoid interacting with suspicious messages.

Why choose Proofpoint Essentials?

• Enterprise-grade email security made accessible for SMBs and channel partners
• People-centric protection against phishing, malware, ransomware, impersonation, BEC, supplier fraud, and account compromise
• Multi-layered defense across inbound filtering, outbound filtering, URL Defense, Attachment Defense, sandboxing, encryption, DLP, continuity, and archiving
• Strong fit for Microsoft 365 environments, with support for mailflow integration, Azure Active Directory synchronization, SAML/SSO, and management APIs
• Flexible packages that let organizations match protection levels to risk, compliance needs, feature requirements, and budget
• Continuity, encryption, DLP, and archiving options that help protect communications, reduce downtime risk, and support compliance or discovery requirements
• Ongoing threat-intelligence and detection updates designed to keep pace with evolving email attacks

Why choose Proofpoint Essentials from Vircom?

• Vircom Portal with 100+ MSP-built tools and enhancements included at no added cost
• One login for cross-customer visibility, tenant health, mailflow, reporting, and alerts
• Bulk automation for onboarding, upgrades, user changes, domains, sender lists, and security settings
• Proactive monitoring for DNS, Microsoft 365, authentication, configuration drift, and account-takeover signals
• Outlook Add-In that helps users report threats, self-serve routine tasks, and reduce helpdesk tickets
• PSA integrations and licensing visibility that help MSPs simplify billing and protect margins
• Expert support from a team with more than 30 years of email-security experience

Vircom does more than resell Proofpoint Essentials. It adds an MSP-focused operating layer that helps partners and IT teams manage email security with greater visibility, less manual work, and stronger business control. Through Vircom Portal and more than 100 MSP-built enhancements, teams can centralize customer management, automate repetitive tasks, spot issues earlier, support users more effectively, and connect security operations to billing and profitability.

That added value reflects Vircom’s roots in email security. With more than 30 years in the email market, including experience building mail server and secure email gateway technologies, Vircom brings deep product knowledge and practical MSP insight to the way it supports, extends, and operationalizes Proofpoint Essentials.

Vircom Portal and 100+ enhancements

Vircom Portal gives MSPs a unified place to manage customers, monitor health, act on alerts, and use enhancements designed around real MSP workflows. The goal is to make Proofpoint Essentials easier to operate across many customers, so teams can protect more users, reduce manual effort, and deliver more value without needing to grow headcount at the same pace.

Monitoring, alerts, dashboards, and reporting

Instead of checking each tenant one at a time, Vircom gives MSPs a clearer view across customers, domains, mailflow, tenant health, and configuration posture. Dashboards, aggregated alerts, DNS and authentication checks, and mailflow reporting help teams catch problems earlier, prepare stronger client reviews, and show the value of the service in language clients can understand.

Automations

Vircom helps reduce repetitive work with bulk and programmatic actions for everyday MSP tasks. Teams can handle onboarding, package upgrades, user changes, domain updates, spam sensitivity settings, sender-list hygiene, and anti-spoofing configuration more efficiently. That means fewer manual steps, fewer configuration errors, and more time for higher-value client work.

Outlook Add-In

Vircom’s Outlook Add-In gives users helpful self-service tools directly inside Outlook. Users can report suspicious messages, review email logs, access quarantine or archive features where available, use the emergency inbox during outages, manage trusted or blocked senders, and perform encryption-related actions. For MSPs and IT teams, this helps users make safer choices while reducing routine support tickets.

Microsoft 365, hybrid, and advanced routing support

Vircom also helps simplify Microsoft 365 and complex mailflow operations. Monitoring and setup support can help teams manage connectors, permissions, Azure application registrations, synchronization health, DNS records, and risky signals such as suspicious forwarding rules or failed-login patterns. For more complex environments, Vircom can also support advanced routing needs such as split delivery, alternate ports, connection-level logs, and edge-case relays.

Security & Compliance Tools

Vircom helps strengthen security posture by surfacing issues that are easy to miss in day-to-day administration. This includes disabled defenses, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC problems, DNS and MX errors, risky safe-sender entries, display-name impersonation risks, and other configuration gaps that can weaken protection, hurt deliverability, or create client-facing support issues.

PSA Integrations

For MSPs, Vircom connects security operations to business operations. PSA integrations with platforms such as ConnectWise Manage, Datto Autotask, Syncro, and HaloPSA help sync protected user counts, costs, and licensing information. That makes billing easier to reconcile, helps catch overages, supports non-billable account handling, and protects margins as customer environments grow.

What about Proofpoint 365 Total Protection?

Proofpoint Essentials remains a strong fit for organizations and MSPs looking for layered email security packages. For MSPs standardizing around Microsoft 365 who also want broader security, compliance, backup, recovery, governance, and security awareness capabilities, Proofpoint 365 Total Protection may also be worth evaluating. Vircom can help partners understand which path fits their customer base, migration plans, and operational model.

For MSPs: If you want help choosing the right Proofpoint Essentials package for your customers, Vircom can help you compare packages, standardize recommendations, and use Vircom Portal to manage Proofpoint Essentials more efficiently across tenants.

For IT teams: If you are not sure whether Business, Advanced Plus, or Professional Plus is the right fit, Vircom can recommend a package based on your users, compliance needs, Microsoft 365 environment, security priorities, and budget.

Conclusion

Proofpoint Essentials offers layered email security packages for organizations with different risk profiles, compliance needs, and budgets. By understanding what each package includes, where the Plus features add value, and how Vircom enhances management, automation, reporting, and MSP operations, you can choose the level of protection that best fits your business today while staying prepared for tomorrow’s threats.