Learn to Use Email Safely

Email is a core component to many businesses. With 124.5 billion business emails being sent and received each day, that doesn’t seem to be in danger of ending. Are the emails that are coming and going from your business secure? That may be another story, altogether. In order to keep your email security at a premium, we have outlined the following tips:

Using Filters
Filters make a lot of things easier to manage and easier to interact with, but since your employees have to stay on top of their company email, having some pretty easy-to-use solutions is important. Spam-blocking can go a long way toward reducing the amount of unimportant emails each employee sees, and a dedicated antivirus software can keep malware and other nefarious entities off of your network.

Be Smarter with Your Email
No spam filter or antivirus will do it all. In order to achieve the best results with securing your email, users have to be well-versed in the best practices of email management. The most important qualification any person can make when trying to secure their personal email from hackers is to ensure that they have the knowledge of what a phishing email might look like; and to make sure that the business’ network security is up to snuff.

Here are few tips to keep your email secure.

• Know what a legitimate email looks like. For every email sent from a vendor or partner, there are two sent that are there to trick end-users.
• If you aren’t going to take the time to encrypt your email, don’t put any potentially sensitive information within the email. This goes for heath, financial, or personal information.
• The less people who have your email address, the more secure your email is going to be. Teach your employees to not give out their email addresses if they can help it.
• The email solution needs to be secured behind solid passwords, and/or biometrics. Two-factor authentication can also be a good solution to secure an email against intrusion.

End Your Session
There are circumstances that people can’t control, so if you absolutely have to use a publicly-accessible device to access your email, you have to make certain that you log out of the email client and device you access your email on. After you log out, you’ll want to clear the cache. Many browsers and operating systems today want to save your password for user convenience. Better to use a password manager than allow the most public points of your workstation to save your credentials.

Washington Works can help you set up an email security policy that will work to ensure that your employees are trained, and you have the solutions you need to keep any sensitive emails away from prying eyes. Call us today at 301-571-5040 to learn more.