Small Business Guide to Email

First email SMALL BUSINESS GUIDE TO sent in 1971. EMAIL AΤΥΡΙCAL COMPANY WITH 300 EMPLOYEES HAS... 350 Email remains one of the more important applica- tions for business commu- nication. In fact. "employ- ees spend nearly an hour each day managing their email." Yet, it is one of the applications that is most frequently under attack (spam.virus. phishing). This guide will help you ensure that your email system stays up-and- running. EMAIL ACCOUNTS ....... .. A 392,000 GOOD EMAILS PER MONTH ................................................... 1,306,667 SPAM EMAILS FILTERED & VIRUSES BLOCKED PER MONTH PERSPECTIVE In 2011. there were over 3 billion email accounts worldwide. with spam representing over 70% of the email trattic. 1) GET MAIL DELIVERED The basics: Email is worthless if it doesn't get delivered. IF YOU'VE HEARD CUSTOMERS SAY THEY DIDN'T GET YOUR EMAIL, YOUR EMAIL SERVER MAY BE BLACKLISTED. You may be blocked or marked as spam. PROTECT AGAINST HIJACKERS Protection begins with the correct settings. Confirm with your → service provider that the following items are set correctly. This can be complicated and mistakes with settings can have negative OPEN RELAY IS TURNED OFF [IMPORTANT) SENDER POLICY FRAMEWORK (SPF) SOLUTION REVERSE DNS CONFIGURED consequences (which are often serious). 2) ACCESS ANYTIME, ANYWHERE What good is email it you can't get to it? Ever have trouble reaching your email? Are you told the servers are down? SOLUTION Having your email hosted on Cloud-based servers allows for anytime access. When your email is hosted on a single server and it goes down, so does your access. Enable mobile access technologies like Active Sync. Blackberry, or Push Email to keep email synchronized. (3 GET RID OF SPAM 19% of spam is still delive- • red to corporate email in- boxes despite spam tilters. Spam kills your productivity. NOT ONLY CAN SPAM LEAD TO HR COMPLAINTS, IT'S A PRODUCTIVITY НOG. SOLUTION Ettective SPAM filtering requires a collection of Pro SPAM filtering tools M Cloudmark which learn and auto- M Spamassassin matically update. 4) FIND STUFF The importance of finding and filtering email can't be overstated. Lost productivity trying to tind what you saw in an email. If you manually move email to your folders - there's a better way! HR SOLUTION SEARCH FOLDERS [EXAMPLE]: GET A LOT OF EMAIL ON A PAR- TICULAR TOPIC LIKE 'HR' - CREATE AN 'HR' HR FOLDER TO AUTOMATICALLY GRAB ALL EMAIL SENT TO 'HR'. NO ADDITIONAL EFFORT IS REQUIRED. With most modern email sys- tems. you can create search 1olders for the topics you deal with most. 5) KILL PHISHING Only give your information to trustworthy sources. STOP INTRUDERS FROM GATHERING Bad guys posing as good guys. Baiting you with websites that look like legitimate companies. PERSONAL INFORMATION FROM YOUR EMPLOYEES BY POSING AS SOMEONE THEY CAN TRUST. Your private data: Credit card numbers, so- cial security information. address, phone number. etc. DMARC: NEW technology confirms email authenticity - so (Domain-Based Message Authentication. Reporting & Conformance) email sent from an SOLUTION @XYZ.com email add- ress is actually from XYZ company. 6) BACKUP & STORAGE Good backup solutions recover just the email you lost. Emails and asso- ciated attachments ultimately affect the performance of your server which also impacts the speed WHAT HAPPENS SOLUTION IF EMAIL ACCIDENTALLY GETS DELETED? Ask service provider to increase your storage. MOVE YOUR TO the CLOUD EMAIL in three easy steps EST. TIME 1 MIN. PER ACCOUNT 1 CREATE EMAIL ACCOUNTS ON CLOUD SERVER. EST. TIME 5 MIN. PER DOMAIN POINT MX RECORD FOR DOMAIN TO CLOUD EMAIL SERVER. EST. TIME 18 MIN. EACH ACCT HOLDER 3 ADD NEW ACCOUNT TO EXISTING DESKTOP EMAIL APPLICATION. (OUTLOOK, MAIL), & DRAG OLD EMAIL INTO NEW ACCOUNT. Obrinkster Sources: Steven L. Rohall from IBM's TJ. Watson Research Center: Internet 2011 in numbers, Pingdom: Managing Email Storage Before it Becomes a Problem, by Brian Azzopardi, TALKTechToMe