Things Never To Do With Your Email

Our names are Tom Mitt, founder, and Jake Polzin, president of TBG Technologies, an IT support company since 2004.

Email has come a long way since the first message was sent between 2 computers back in 1971. The number of emails sent since then has grown incredibly. Worldwide, 306.4 billion emails were sent daily in 2020. This is expected to grow to 320 billion daily in 2021.

Obviously, people have come to rely on email to the point where it has largely replaced other forms of communication. When was the last time you wrote a letter to a friend? If you are under 30, it is possible never. How about faxes? Emails have quickly replaced the fax machines in almost all offices. Email is quick, convenient, and almost fun to use. In business, email is the standard form of communication.

Email has become so easy to use that we forget that it is not a private medium. In the past when you wrote a letter, you had a reasonable expectation that the only person to read it was the person who received it. Not true with email. When you send an email, it passes through an unknown number of computers before it is received and at any point along that trail, your email could be stored, saved, and later read by someone. And even if it gets to your intended recipient untouched, once it is on that person’s computer it is open to anyone who might have access.

Do you have a curious person in your office or home? They could read your emails. Did you just fire someone? They might be able to get your messages. Did you send someone your password in an email message? Really, you did that?

It is important that you keep this in mind when sending an email. Here are a few things to do whenever you create an email to help prevent unwanted intrusions:

• Never send an email that includes your login and password to any website. Sounds like common sense, right? You’d be surprised to know that a large number of people do just that.
• When sending a message to multiple people, put their addresses in the “Bcc:” field. “Bcc:” stands for “Blind Carbon Copy” (if you don’t know what a carbon copy is, look it up.). If you use the “CC:” field, everyone who gets the message also gets everyone else’s email address. You may not want your email address shared with people you don’t know. And if any one of those recipients gets a virus, all the emails in that message are now capable of being attacked.
• If you regularly send documents that include confidential or potentially sensitive information, use a method of encryption on that document. At the very least, save the document with a password (Word, Excel, and just about every other program has that capability) and then give the recipient the password (don’t send it by email!). That way, only the person with the password will be able to open it.
• If the document you are attaching is extremely sensitive, don’t attach it. Use a third-party storage system (like OneDrive) to save the document and then send a link to the document instead.

Email use is only going to increase, making this a juicy target for hackers, corporate spies and digital vandals. Don’t make yourself and others in your email address book bigger targets!

In the coming weeks, we’ll be posting educational information so you’re able to become the best business owner you can be. We’ll touch on backups, anti-virus, internet safety, cyber-attacks, ransomware, the cloud, email safety, VOIP phone systems, and others.

Tom Mitt is the founder and Jake Polzin is the president of TBG Technologies, located at 11300 W. Greenfield Avenue, West Allis, Wis. 53214. Tom can be reached at toomas@tbgtechnologies.com and Jake can be reached at jake@tbgtechnologies.com. www.tbgtechnologies.com We Make Technology Behave.