Think and keep your privacy

I think that the best solutions are the simplest and that anyone SHOULD at least have the following first point as a standard policy, even if you think privacy is NOT an issue for you.

Cases:

1. When accessing the Internet via an open wireless network, you need to make sure that your e-mail access are going through a secure protocol (or a tunnel) such as SSL; all mail clients such as outlook express provide that capability.

2. You must assure confidentiallity to all your customers, the cases of clients of most notaries and lawyers, but also for software developpers and the like when source code is updated or transfered.

Solutions:

In the first case, this is extremelly easy by using a ssl encrypted mail servers and this should be the default for any serious office, ask you isp or switch to an isp who will spend the time to help you set it up .

In the second case, what you can to do is to provide free e-mail addresses based on your domain to all customers who have accounts with your firm and instruct them to simply use your ssl encryption to send/receive e-mails to your agents. This is very good for lawyers and notaries as this is in fact creating an extranet (which is like an intranet but accessed from the outside) and there is no unencrypted communication to any other servers than the one where your domain is hosted. In addition when you need even higher security, you can have your own private and dedicated virtual mail server outsourced BUT only accessible by your trustworthy network administrator who can access and maintain it. If you are paranoid you can even encrypt the mailbox content on the server itself or even the whole disk partition. This is usually much more expensive but only you know how much value the information is worth. 

Now that you know, should you ask me why you should go to the trouble of setting up such account? I would answer: I have not been presented with any evidence or proof that the knowledge and the providers were not available to assure your company's privacy.

 When you want my help on that, simply click here .