Protecting your critical business email (Part 2 of 2)16 February 2006
When using a basic or free email solution, there are a number of things you can do to protect your email. We offer some practical advice and reasons why you should consider upgrading to an advanced email solution such as BT Business Email Plus.
Tip #1 - Protect Your POP Email:
If you decide to use a basic email offering that uses POP to connect, make sure every employee has a mail client set up to leave messages on the server to benefit from weekly backups. If you use Outlook as your mail client, you can see this setting by clicking as follows:
Tools->Email Accounts->View or Change Existing Email Accounts->Double Click on the Account->More Settings->Advanced Tab
Under delivery, you will see options for leaving copies of messages on the server. Make sure messages are left for more than the weekly backup period to be safe. Take note though, this will only protect email received in the past few weeks, as basic email offers do not archive backups, but rather rotate through the same tapes on typically a monthly basis. See Tip #4 for additional guidance.
Tip #2 - At a Minimum, Backup Mail Files:
Unless PC or laptop backups are automated and forced, most employees will not take the time to protect their data frequently enough. Take the preventative action to at least instruct each employee on the location of his or her mail file. If you use Outlook as your mail client, you can see this setting by clicking as follows:
Tools->Options->Mail Setup Tab->Data Files->Settings->Filename Box
Consider providing your employees with a portable USB external drive that is sufficient in size to hold their mail file and send out weekly reminders to make a backup copy. The benefit is worth the investment in the external drives.
Tip #3 - Pay Attention to Availability:
Make sure you understand the systerap m availability objectives of your email provider. Free email offerings do not typically receive the same investment in hardware, software and redundancy than a business grade email solution. Make a point of asking a provider what their availability levels have been over the past few months and then calculate the impact of that downtime to your business before making a choice for an email solution. BT Business Email Plus is built on a platform with a target availability of 99.5%. Even a few percentages of downtime can translate into hours of lost productivity, so be sure you know what you can expect.
Tip #4 - Go Beyond POP:
Even if you benefit from a weekly backup using a basic email offering, the simple fact is that it will be difficult and time-consuming to retrieve an individual user's mailbox if a PC or laptop is lost or damaged. Further, you'll only have access to the most recent messages because backup tapes are often rotated and written over every few weeks.
If your email is truly a business critical asset, consider BT Business Email Plus. BT Business Email Plus is built on the complete capabilities of Microsoft's Exchange messaging solution. In addition to a daily backup of your mail, messages are not downloaded from the server to a user's inbox. Rather, a copy of the message remains on the server. Users can store 150-200MB of data in their inbox depending on the version of BT Business Email Plus selected, and all of this data, plus contacts, diary entries and tasks is protected by daily BT backups.
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