Like so many of you out there, I upgraded my Apple device to iOS 5 recently, and with that I found that I could get a free email account in the iCloud, an @me.com email address. My immediate response was to go “heck yeah!” and sign up for it. I did, added it to my other devices, and only then did I stop to think for a moment about what I did. That made five, yes, that’s right, FIVE email accounts that my phone would check every so many minutes to interrupt my day with yet another notification that I must check to see what someone sent me. That’s now FIVE email accounts I have to worry about filtering for spam, and securing with unique usernames and passwords, and that I will have to search through when, six months after reading an email and remembering only vaguely what it was about, need to find it again. Continue reading It’s Time to Stop the Madness

So you have been tasked with securing your organization’s email services.

There are quite a few guides available on the Internet and in different computer bookstores that can take you through the basics – and if you are ahead of the game you may have already done your homework. Continue reading Secure Your Desktop – Protect Your Email

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

Getting your co-workers to adhere to policies that govern the use of email in the workplace can be tough. Despite your best efforts, email is still used to send jokes, chain letters, pictures, slide shows and other inappropriate content.

For whatever reason, people don’t quite get that not only are email policies in place to protect them and the company brand, but there are consequences for violating these policies. Unfortunately, the only time when people begin to comprehend just how serious email policies are is when it is too late.

Continue reading Email Scandals That Should Make Us Think Twice

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

Email has become a vital part of our lives, crucial in to business and the way we work in this new information age. With literally billions of email messages being sent every single day, it has become quite literally indispensable. Each business worker sends an average of 36 emails a day, and they receive as many as 74 in return. This huge volume brings into sharp focus issues of mailbox size, as well as the attachment size for files that go with the emails that we send and receive.

Specifically, I am considering the issue of email attachments from the perspective of businesses and their employees.

Most corporations, in order to try and balance storage capacity with backup and restore time, and data recovery, will place restrictions on the size of their users’ mailboxes. Companies will also restrict the size of an attachment that users can send via the corporate email server. Sometimes, companies will also place restrictions on the size of email attachments that can be received as well.

Continue reading The Tricky Question of Balancing Mailbox Size Limits

If you receive tons of emails daily then it is imperative to know how to manage your inbox.  Emails, if not removed regularly, can clog your inbox making it look messy and disorganized.  An overloaded inbox would definitely not help you do your job better or quicker.  In fact, it may even be a cause for delays since there would be so much information that you have to deal with. An inbox that is brimming with messages can also cause your system to crash, which can delete all information from Outlook.

Another reason why you should clean your inbox regularly is that an inbox that is clogged with information would make it easy for you to lose track of important emails that require immediate action.  This is because mails would be piled up on top of each other, making it hard for you to locate critical and crucial messages.

Continue reading 6 Tips for Effective Inbox Management

Is your email inbox literally bursting at the seams every time you open it? If it is, then don’t you think that perhaps it’s time to get a little more organized? Having an overflowing email inbox is the main cause of your email client slowing down, and it also means you waste time not being able to find crucial emails in a hurry.

I understand it might seem like a daunting task to get yourself organized, but it’s really not so difficult when you know how. The first step on the road towards organization is cleaning up your inbox, followed by some intelligent archiving of your emails. In this post I’m going to outline my simple Microsoft Outlook system for keeping my emails tidy, and I’ll also throw in some tips on how you can archive your older emails too. And even if you use another email client instead of Outlook, you can probably apply these tips anyway.

The most important tool that Outlook has is the AutoArchive feature. It allows you to do all kinds of things, including directing where archived data should go and specifying how old items need to be before they are archived.

Continue reading 7 Tips For Managing Outlook Email Archives

My colleague Paul Mah recently wrote an excellent article called “The Argument for Smaller Email Inboxes.” In this post, he laid out several compelling reasons why companies may want to limit the size of their users’ inboxes, and I encourage you to review Paul’s article, either before continuing with this one, or after. Every story has two sides, and his post addresses real issues companies may encounter if they simply allow unlimited mailbox size without first assessing their environment.

However, I have been and always will be an advocate for larger mailboxes. The larger, the better, and if you have the infrastructure, and the clients that can support this, I think you’ll understand that this is a great way to go. While my post here will address Microsoft Exchange, several of the ideas are applicable to other mail servers too. Here are my 5 reasons for supporting larger inboxes.

Continue reading 5 Reasons for Larger Email Inboxes

The release of Microsoft Exchange 2010 substantially increased the maximum database size that can be handled by its core messaging engine to 16TB (Terabyte).  This is 10 times more than the 200GB (Gigabyte) supported in Exchange 2007, and must appeal to companies looking to support more users or larger mailbox quotas.  Of course, the maximum supported size does not necessarily conform to best practice sizes recommended by Microsoft, for which the Microsoft Exchange team has released a detailed spreadsheet documenting the various scalability limits here. (You will need Excel 2007 and later to open it)

Regardless of the Exchange Server version in use, enterprises have a number of techniques to support the needs of their organization.  What I want to talk about today however, are some considerations that email administrators and IT managers should evaluate prior to upping the limits on their corporate inbox.

Continue reading The Argument for Smaller Email Inboxes