Call 01202 43 43 40
Email info@mesmo.co.uk
Careless emails can be very expensive. Last week I ran a workshop on ‘Managing the risk of cyber crime’. Cyber crime in all its different guises now costs business more than physical crime according to a recent Cabinet Office report (you and I stealing pens and paper from the staionary cupboard). In financial terms, cyber crime costs businesses about £17bn per year. Recovering from a breach of security costs most business between £20,000 and £500,00 according to PcW.
The inclusion of e-evidence can add upto an extra £500,000. Yet as the KPMG e-disclosure report identfied, few High Court Judges really know how to handle e-evidence. Indeed witness the super injunction fracas.
Sony admitted it will loose revenue and clients as a result of the hacker attack on its Playstation network.
All this prompted me to re-visit how easy it is to leak confidential information through email.
You can have the very best technology to scan outgoing emails for content, block the use of unkown USB sticks etc. However, at then end of the day the majority of cyber crime is committed by human error. The most common leaks occur through the following human actions.
How often have you either been trained in email best practice and the law or trained those who work for your business? Probably, if you are like most organisations, rarely and often only after an incident.
There are two simple steps any business can take to manage the risk of a cyber crime attack through email. First, have an up-to-date Acceptable Usage Policy which has been read and accepted by all employees. Second, provide adequate user training.
During the week I will post some simple ways for everyone to help manage the risk of breaching security and compliance. A subsequent blog will also look at the common laws which govern email.
Tags: cyber crime, email best practice, email security
Do your emails stand out in the recipient’s crowded inbox? Rhymer Rigby’s article ‘Be authentic:What to wear at work’ in Monday’s FT prompted me to revisit the question of how do you make sure your email stand out in a crowded inbox and convey the right image.
Should an email be as perfect as a letter?
This question is posed frequently by clients, of all ages, all sectors and from business of all sizes. Some argue that email is an informal communication and that more lax rules, grammar, punctuation and layout are acceptable. Your email sends a signal about you and your business just as clearly as the clothes you wear send a message about you and your persona. The question then is dress down or keep to the smart business suit.
More often than not you and your email recipient will not have met let alone spoken. But within five seconds of reading your email the recipient will have formed a picture of you and it may not be the one you wanted to convey. Nonetheless, it is their picture and it determines the tenor of the relationship. Sloppy email (jeans and tee shirt) may reflects badly on you because it may suggest both you and your business are sloppy. For some clearly jeans and a tee shirt are acceptable and only you can decide.
Your email must therefore instantly convey the right tone and language just as the clothes you wear create an image of you. This ’email dress’ code must be carried through from the subject-line and initial greeting to your signature and disclaimer at its end if you want to convey a professional image. This blog has been based on material in Brilliant Email: how to win back time and increase your productivity.
Follow this week’s Tweets for daily tips the image you create through your email etiquette.
Tags: email best practice, email etiquette
Are your emails resource hungry or sustainable?
Email misuse significantly increases an organisation’s and an individuals carbon foot print. Getting the email traffic down in order to save energy is one of my pet grips.
It never ceases to amaze me how few people spring clean their inboxes. Yet, the bigger the inbox the more natural resources needed to run the email servers. The reply is usually either why should I waste my time, or servers are cheap. Fine if you don’t care about the businesses profitability and the environment. It’s funny because if you kept so much paper that you ran out of office space you would soon have a clear out. So why not do the same with email?
Meanwhile of course most cloud-based email services such as Gmail and Hotmail actively encourage big inboxes.
Then there are the emails themselves – all those long signature blocks with icons and endless straplines. The one which makes me most cross is ‘please consider the environment and don’t print this email unless absolutely necessary’.
Short simple emails are best and that includes the signature block. There is nothing more annoying and unprofessional than an email where more space is taken up by all the marketing and PR blurb than by the message itself. What a waste. Furthermore, icons embedded in the email use up even more storage space.
Then there are all the unnecessary emails sent primarily either to cover your backside or shout about how clever you are. More wasted processing resources (eg energy) and server space.
What about fancy fonts and colour? Heaven forbid you need to print these. What a waste of toner unless you remember to use the black and white printer. However, all too often a coloured email lures you to the colour printer.
My daily email tips for this week were planned to focus on email best practice and sustainability as a result of recent and future client projects. By chance I heard about Green Office Week happening in May.
Prepare for Green Office Week by taking steps to make your emails more sustainable and use the minimum of resources. For tips follow my Tweet at Emaildoctor.
Tags: email best practice, email overload, green office week
Will you be checking your email over the Easter break? Or will you be bold and switch off completely in order to recharging your batteries and have quality time with your family and friends? After all that is what holidays are about.
Checking your emails constantly is a sure way to drive up the stress and disrupt a holiday. It is not unheard of for a husband/wife to throw their other half’s expensive iphone/Blackberry in the sea. That’s a bit of a waste.
One way to help you resist the email honey trap is to leave your smart phone (Blackberry, iphone etc) safely at home and take just a conventional mobile phone.
If you can not make that leap of faith (and I confess I can not always) then reduce the number of times you check your email to at most twice (morning and evening). The best being once a day at the end of the day with drink in your hand. You will surprised at how much less pressing the emails look when seen through a glass of wine!..
What will you be doing whilst on leave – checking or going cold turkey?
Tags: email addiction, email best practice
Information overload is a prevalent disease of 21st Centuary business life, often predicated by email overload. We live in a predominantly push rather than pull information culture: this is one of the main causes of this disease. However, we have it within our personal power to change that culture and be far more vigilant about what information is thrown at us and often by email.
I have just sent out a reminder email about forthcoming some Brilliant Email Master Classes and was pleased to see that ten people ‘unsubscribe’ from my mailing list. No I am not a sadist, but simply delighted to see people taking my email best practice medicine.
To manage the risk of catching the information overload virus you need to be be ruthless about the emails which reach your inbox and hence reduce the email overload. In the first instance that means ‘unsubscribing’ from any mailing lists (internal and external) from which you receive information which you feel is not useful to you personally.
If that can not be done perhaps because either your mail server does not let you access the website or the sender has provided no unsubscribe mechanism then take alternative avoidance action. Try using:
Simply deleting unnecessary emails is both a waste of time (click here to check for yourself) and makes you very vulnerable to the information overload virus.
Eighty percent of what you really need comes from twenty percent of the information you receive. However, only you can identify which is the twenty percent for you. Then you and only you must prioritise and take suitable measure to avoid being laid low by the email overload and hence information overload disease.
Tags: email best practice, email management, email overload