Personal Email Not Good For Business
- ABC Computer Solutions
- Feb 11, 2015
- 3 min read
With today's tight economic times, Obamacare, and everything else costing businesses more money businesses are always on the lookout for ways to cut costs. There is one area of your business that you should never cut costs, your email!
Many businesses today that don't have an IT provider don't understand the risks they put on themselves and their clients by using personal email addresses for business. Personal email addresses like those anyone can create at Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. put you and your clients at risk!
Personal email accounts are risky for more reasons than one but the biggest reason is that it leaves your company's clients open to phishing attacks. Phishing attacks are a type of hacking technique in which the attacker creates a website or email address to act as though they are from a particular organization even though they are not.
The problem with personal email addresses is that it's very simple for someone that is not part of your company to act as if they are from your company. For instance, say my company was called The Toledo Baked Goods Company and we used personal email addresses from Gmail, our email address may look something like this: frank.toledobakedgoods@gmail.com. Ever seen companies do things like this? If so they are putting themselves and their clients at risk.
While the frank.toledobakedgood@gmail.com email address may function, here's the problem, let's say a hacker wanted to act like they were from your company. All that person would have to do to look like a representative of your company is go to gmail.com and create an address like this hackersname.toledobakedgoods@gmail.com and now you have another person out there, outside your company acting like a representative of your company.
The problem if this were to happen is now you have a person out there that can be requesting checks by sending false invoices and just about anything they wanted to do to make your business's life and more importantly your clients very difficult.
So how do we go about preventing this type of thing from happening? Well that's pretty simple, don't use personal email for business. With ABC Computer Solutions Hosted Exchange Email Solutions we can setup email for you that can sync to your mobile devices, web mail, and a email client on your computer like Microsoft Outlook and protect your company by giving you email to use that only your company can make addresses on.
For instance, ABC Computer Solutions uses our abccsg.com domain for our email, our clients know that all of our correspondents with them come from that domain, not from a Gmail, Hotmail, or any other email address.
Having the ability to control who is able to email your clients and look like your business is a very important step in making sure you and your clients are secure. Instead of a bakery let's say our company did uses private email addresses (we don't), if we did and someone was acting as if they were from our company they could be requesting passwords, credit cards for payments, and other highly confidential information from not so tech savvy clients that could potentially put their entire organizations at risk as well. All this because our company didn't have appropriate email solutions in place (but we do...).
Contact us today to see what we can do to help keep you and your clients safe from phishing attacks! Visit our website at www.abccomputersolutionstoledo.com and check out our section on Email Hosting.
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