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

Or is it? In a move that will have technology professionals first aghast, and then scratching their head, and finally a little jealous, Thierry Breton, the Chief Executive Office of the French information technology company ATOS has enacted a policy of “zero email”, in essence, banning internal email.

With more than 74,000 employees in 42 countries and 2010 revenues of $11.5 billion, this is not a small statement or a simple change in corporate culture.

Continue reading No Email at Work? Inconceivable!

Some estimates peg the average amount of time a typical knowledge worker spends on email each business day at three hours. If the typical readers of this blog are anything like me at all, we can probably double that number, and add six or more hours each Saturday and Sunday to that. Continue reading 11 Tips to help you avoid inbox overload

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

Advanced persistent threats make email security a necessity

Most email administrators consider security to be a large part of what they do. With so many laws and regulations governing the storage, discovery and retrieval of email messages, security has become a second job to many.

Unfortunately, many administrators either forget, or simply aren’t aware, that securing email requires much more effort than hardening the email servers against attack. In order to fully protect your organization’s email and their contents the mailbox also needs to be defended. Especially when you consider how popular Advanced Persistent Threats are becoming with large cyber crime syndicates who use email not only as a way to harvest sensitive information, but also as a method of attack through phishing and social engineering. Continue reading Tips for Better Email Security

In just one week Google, the International Monetary Fund and Citigroup have all made headlines as a result of email associated with them being under attack. The reason we continue to see companies make the news as a result of email attacks is that email security is sometimes ignored when it comes to training users properly and making good decisions. In some cases, having the latest and greatest when it comes to security tools even creates a false sense of security that causes us, and our users, to overlook the little things. A multi-layered defense that has been properly configured with all the best technology can be rendered useless if the little things are forgotten.

Continue reading 5 Simple Mistakes When it Comes to 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 my previous post, “13 Policies for Securing Your Email – Part 1 of 2”, I enumerated the following seven of thirteen policies for securing email exchanges. There are many more actions which administrators and organizations can incorporate in their email policies and procedures that I will discuss in future posts.

1. Do not immediately open attachments.
2. Create tiered email architecture.
3. Add automatic filtering mechanisms.
4. Instruct your end users what email message links and icons not to open.
5. Keep your anti-virus software up to date.
6. Proper secure email procedures should include disabling the opening of additional browser windows from being opened upon the clicking of links within email messages.
7. From the end user perspective, whenever outgoing email has been marked by them as confidential then encryption techniques should be employed to ensure that the email messages cannot be changed or read by third parties.

   Here then are the remaining six of thirteen actions worthy of any organization’s secure email policies and procedures.
   Continue reading 13 Policies for Securing Your Email – Part 2 of 2