When starting out, many small businesses set up their email using one of the free accounts available to them. Services like Gmail by Google, Hotmail from Microsoft or Yahoo!’s mail service, provide a working email address with almost no maintenance for a business just getting its feet wet.

However this may not be the best way to make a first impression with your potential customers.

Listed below are seven reasons why you need to ditch the yourcompany@freeemail.com and go with an address that better reflects the image you want your company to have. Continue reading 7 Reasons to Ditch That Free Email Address

Many email administrators and users alike cringe when they receive email messages with emoticons. Most email etiquette and protocols call for avoiding unnecessary files, images, graphics and HTML. Placing a smiley in the context of your email basically violates all of these best practices and, in the eyes of many, just looks extremely unprofessional. Continue reading Email Communication Emotions

When looking at solutions on securing email, many people don’t take into consideration the type of business environment they work in. All too often, after spending a great amount of time and money, small to medium-sized enterprises find out that what works for a company the size of Bank of America doesn’t quite work for them.

To better help SMBs find solutions scaled to their needs when it comes to email security, I have compiled a list of 5 tips that address the risks and restraints that they face. Continue reading 5 Essential Tips for SMB Email Security

Developments in cloud based computing have shown quite a bit of excitement and promise, especially when it comes to small to medium sized businesses. Those who evangelize the cloud will often cite the many benefits of moving to a cloud based email service. The litany of favorable reasons to examine moving email services off site that are oft quoted fall into line with the reasons used to move to any new technology:

• Ease of scalability
• Ease of software updates
• Email access anywhere
• Better disaster recovery
• Ease of implementation
• And of course, reduced costs

So when a vendor, or even someone in your own organization, throw these at management looking to save money and increase productivity then it seems like the question moves from why should we move to the cloud? to why has it taken us so long to move our email to the cloud?

Is it really that easy?

Continue reading 4 Considerations for Cloud Based Email

Online communication has long been the scapegoat for a lack of personal communication skills that is seemingly growing in business and society. Pat Stonehouse, a business etiquette expert with Advancing with Style, established March as National E-mail Etiquette month to help boost proper use of e-mail when it comes to business communications.

“E-mail has changed how we communicate in business, and has become the predominant language of corporate culture. It comes with its own set of rules called ‘netiquette’”, reads Stonehouse’s website.

And the statistics back up his claims since 90 percent of all business interaction nowadays is done via email. One mistake in protocol can really have a devastating effect on how you are viewed by co-workers, employers, and clients. Repeat this mistake 90 percent of the time and productivity is certain to suffer.

Continue reading 10 Things We Can Learn From Email Etiquette Month

With so many businesses still trying to figure out how to leverage social media in the workplace, email continues to be the primary method of communication among employees. Whether they are communicating with co-workers, managers, customers or distributors email still reigns supreme. In fact, 94 percent of all American Internet users send or read email every day according to the Pew Research Center. In the workplace it is estimated that workers spend 41 percent of their day handling email according to the Radicati Group.

While email is still a primary means of communication among people in the workplace, many businesses fail to put in place a policy that governs how employees use email while they are on the clock. Business owners or IT managers tend to overlook laws and regulations that dictate how email should be used and stored. In small-medium sized businesses there is less of a perceived need for a email policy because employers sometimes don’t see the need to regulate things such as email and Internet use. Unfortunately this can land them in legal trouble.

Continue reading 5 Things Your Email Policy Needs to Have

In a decision likely to be quoted in television drama courtrooms and real ones alike, the Third Appellate District Court in Sacramento California upheld in a 3-0 ruling that a lower court’s decision to admit emails between the plaintiff and her attorney were not privileged because the plaintiff used her employer’s (the defendant) systems to send the emails, and a written policy was in place restricting the personal use of company computers and informing users that email communications could be monitored.

Continue reading Motion Upheld! Acceptable Use Policy trumps Attorney Client Privilege

Peeking into an employee’s Web mail accessed on a company computer during work hours can be illegal–at least in New Jersey, according to that state’s Supreme Court. In a 7-0 decision, the judicial panel upheld a lower court ruling that sanctioned a company for collecting email messages between an employee and her attorney stored on the employee’s company computer.

“Finding that the policies undergirding the attorney-client privilege substantially outweigh the employer’s interest in enforcement of its unilaterally imposed regulation, we reject the employer’s claimed right to rummage through and retain the employee’s emails to her attorney,” the appellate court ruled in its decision upheld by the state’s high court.

The case involved Marina Stengart, the former executive director of nursing at Loving Care, a home health care provider located in Bergen county. After resigning from Loving Care, she filed a discrimination lawsuit against the company.

Loving Care issued Stengart a notebook computer when she worked for the company. She had a work email account, as well as personal Yahoo! mail account. Prior to resigning, she used the Yahoo! account to communicate with her attorney about her potential lawsuit. The Yahoo! emails were stored on her company computer.

Continue reading Peeking into employee’s email can be no-no

IT managers must account for many demands on their time and resources. Storage is always an issue and having to estimate the growth needs of the company and all the various departments can be a time-consuming and sometimes thankless job.

Estimating email storage needs can be started by making assumptions about the average size in bytes that attachments will require, the hours of day that the email servers will be the busiest and the number of users per email server. Those three variables multiplied together are a good starting point in estimating how much storage to allocate for email servers.

And the same computations can also be used when estimating how much storage to allocate for archiving purposes.

Archiving email messages can save an IT data center in many ways. Some of the reasons for archiving email messages include:

Continue reading 7 Reasons for Email Archiving

If you haven’t received an email from someone asking you to buy their latest and greatest digital device or some other product that promises to help you lose weight and look younger in twenty-four hours then consider yourself not part of the world population.

We’ve all received these emails either through our email mailboxes or via text messages on our cell phones. And in case you haven’t heard of it, it’s called spamming.

Spamming involves massive distributions of email messages to recipients that number in the thousands to tens of thousands. All the spammers need is for one percent to five percent of the recipient pool to open their spam messages to get their message out there. That one percent to five percent can translate into 20 to 50 persons for a small sampling of 2,000 recipients to upwards of 200 to 1,000 people on the high end sampling of 20,000 recipients. And it doesn’t cost the spammers anything more than the keystrokes needed to send out their burst of emails and the costs associated with the harvesting of email addresses which is another subject altogether.

So how can an administrator protect their enterprise from being the subject of these email spamming campaigns?

Continue reading 6 Best Ways to Stop Spamming