One of the simplest things you can do to make yourself more professional as a company, is to ensure you have your company domain in your email address e.g. claire@aura.ie, mark@facebook.com.
Email is hugely important today, as much or more so than at any time in the last 30 years. It has morphed from a simple correspondence tool to a serious business tool used for issuing contracts, integrating with CRM, delivering invoices, confirming deliveries. Yet, despite the sometimes-critical nature of email some companies are very casual in what email platform they use, most do not know what security is used or even if their email is backed up.
The move to IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) from POP (Post Office Protocol) has moved email one step away from the user. IMAP allows you to access your emails anywhere on any device, but it also means your device is not the primarily storage location of all your emails. What happens if the server goes down or you have no internet access and are your emails being backed up on that device, who has access to it and how secure is it? These are the questions you should be asking yourself and your provider. Or perhaps you are one of the few that could live without email where it to disappear…
We’ve tried many email solutions over the last 25 years, including encrypting emails with PGP for additional security. At the time circa 2002-2004 we were aware that all emails being transferred over the internet were in plain text and they could be easily intercepted and read, so PGP seemed like a potential solution, it wasn’t, well not for us. Then Google came out with an email solution, you could host 10 emails with them on your own domain. It was fast, accessible and reliable. And those that signed up for it got it for free.
If you want to use Google as a solution for your email. You can sign up to Gsuite – or now known as Google Workplace. https://workspace.google.com/intl/en_ie/ this gives you access to the Gmail platform using your own domain and it also gives you access to storage and additional Workspace tools – it’s a tiered pricing platform and you can subscribe from month to annually for the various tools. The price kicks off at €4.68 per user/email per month. There are many IT support companies that are resellers for this solution, if you don’t want to take on the task of setting it up and supporting it yourself.
Then there is Microsoft. A lot of us have grown up or aged using Microsoft email products. Who could forget Outlook Express released in 1996? This was the core email programme we came across in the late 90s and for most of the noughties and in fairness it did provide a reasonably robust solution. At the time large emails were not that common so you would have been unfortunate or extremely busy to hit the mailbox limit. Some of the more tech orientated users moved to Mozilla’s Thunderbird and it is still available to day.
Microsoft like Google offer a cloud solution for your emails and all of your day to day MS programmes. These start out at €4.20 per month per users/email – https://www.microsoft.com/en-ie/microsoft-365/business/compare-all-microsoft-365-business-products?&activetab=tab:primaryr2
Many email servers do offer limited anti spamming and anti virus functions. If you are having a problem with either of these issues regularly and want to keep your current email solution you can bolt on a product such as Spamtitan.com.
Regardless of the email solution you use. Look at it like it is as critical as your business mobile phone and ensure that it does everything you need. Contact Claire@aura.ie if you need more information.