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More Email Safety Tips for Your Organization

I’ve already presented five key safety tips for protecting your small business email correspondence from intrusion or other malicious behavior.  In this article, I’d like to bring you five more valuable tips to consider when using email for your business correspondence.

After all, what you say and who you say it to via email is sometimes your first impression with your next potentially very profitable project or client - it’s in your best interest to use extreme care in how you protect this correspondence.

• Digitally Sign Your Emails - If you are using good email security practices, then you’ve greatly reduced the likelihood that someone will have the opportunity to steal your email identity, but it is still possible.  However, if you use an encryption tool - such as GnuPG or PGP - to digitally sign your emails, then your recipients who have your public key will be able to determine that no one could have sent emails in question without first having access to your private key…thus making it a pretty good certainty that it came from you.  Always be sure you have a private key that is well-protected.

• Use Blind Carbon Copy When Sending to Multiple Recipients - When sending the same email to multiple recipients, it’s never a good idea to share each recipient’s email address with the others when they don’t know each other.  Basically, it’s rude to share someone’s personal or professional email address with complete strangers without their permission. The way around this is to place your own email address in the To: field and include the intended recipients in the BCC: field.  This also prevents the accidental “reply all’ happening when one of your recipients sends a reply.

• Save Emails in a Safe Place - No amount of encryption for sent e-mails will protect your privacy effectively if, after receiving and decrypting an e-mail, you store it in plain text on a machine to which other people have access. Prominent political figures have found out the hard way that webmail providers don’t do a very good job of ensuring stored email privacy. Many users’ personal computers are not exactly set up with security in mind, either, as in the case of someone whose Windows home directory is set up as a CIFS share with a weak password.

• Use Private Accounts for Private Emails - Email addresses you share with the world - such as responding to forums and message boards or posting on websites - is likely to get targeted by spammers.  Spammers will use your email address both for purposes of sending email to it and spoofing that email address in the From: field of the email headers. The more spammers and phishers who spoof your email address that way, the more likely your email address is to end up on spam blocker blacklists used by ISPs and lazy mail server sysadmins - and the more likely you are to have problems with your emails not getting to their targeted recipients.

• Double Check the Recipient Everytime - Just like with auto-fills on the recipient mentioned in the first article on this topic, it’s important to always double check who you’re sending your emails to.  Accidentally sending a reply to a an individual subscriber on a mailing list rather than sending to the actual mailing list isn’t a huge issue, but it can be an inconvenience.  The converse, however, can become a big problem.  Sending an email meant for an individual to an entire mailing list can be embarrassing or worse if you end up providing information to an entire list of people you don’t really know.