Times are a Changin' (continued)

This results in a very simple fact, email is a very important tool. Actually most companies now state that email is both vital and a totally indispensable tool.

Email also allows us to send other "things" with our messages, using attachments. For example; presentations, spreadsheets and videos. In fact, virtually any digitally formatted 'item' can be sent.

So its easy to see that a company without an operational email system for more than a few hours is likely to be seriously disadvantaged, and loosing email connectivity is considered a primary buisness continuity disaster by most companies.

The operative word is system. It's not enough just to have an email address, that we access once a month. Today's business' need to be able to send and recieve emails within minutes. It needs to safely store the important emails, delete the junk ones, save and retrieve other peoples email addresses and decode any attachments. Then it must have some method of getting to the internet to forward/retrieve emails. Lastly but not least, it needs some protection agains the 'maliciousmail' , deliberately sent to deliver digital poison, such as viruses, Trojans and other malware.

A number of routinely overlooked facts about internet email are worth mentioning.

The internet system was designed to be very robust and survive whatever disaster was thrown at it. There is no guarantee of delivery; there is no mention of delivery timescale. and no security. Usually, if the mail cannot be delivered after 4 days a reply to the sender may be sent saying sorry your message could not be delievered. An email sent over the internet is a secure as writing the same informations on the back of a post card and mailing the postcard. Anyone can read it.

The importance of the email system to a business user can not be overstated, no matter what size the company is. However whilst the corporate user has an IT department that looks after security, availability, scalability and the databases that allow its users to save, restore emails, addresses and attachments most small companies/SOHO users may rely entirely on their ISP to provide these services.

The success or failure of these businesses will ultimately depend on the choice of the ISP being used particularly if the user is dependent on its ISP for mail services. However, not all ISP’s are equal.

ISP’s vary according to the market segment they are trying to attract, and the tariff the user selects. Using domestic/home tariffs for a business email system will cause a disaster eventually, but can you be comforted by the amount of money you have saved? Using an ISP that targets domestic/home users as it primary market segment and tolerates some business users is not a clever idea. Loosing a couple of dozen emails sent to a girl friend does not matter as much as loosing one business order. Similarly, being unable to send emails for a couple of days whilst the ISP upgrades its email system is of no big consequence to grandma in Australia, but it could be very costly not getting your on-line VAT return to the Inland Revenue.

Some ISP systems are configured to allow only a certain amount of email before rejecting incoming mail; your client may be very unhappy when his order is rejected with the reply “rejected by email server, mailbox full”.

Having selected our business grade ISP, the next choice is between the various types of email connectivity.  Do we want, or need, to have our own internal email server or is this best left with the ISP. As usual this is a matter of trade offs between cost complexity availability and accessibility.

Lastly, portables and email clients; by definition portables are always more in danger of being lost or stolen. It always makes sense to use encrypted files systems on them and use ONLY email clients that allow us to store data in an encrypted mail store.