Email as viable form of business communication is approaching its second decade, and it’s now so ubiquitous that email addresses — like your style of hair, clothing and resume — can communicate more about you than you might realize.
Lifehacker.com recently conducted a poll on “email prejudices” and found that among the first 500 respondents, opinions regarding email addresses were surprisingly strong.
Among the major findings: “The username you select is vastly more important than the provider you use. Firstname.lastname@aol.com is preferred to and more respectable than sexkitten2010@aol.com — cutesy, offensive or unprofessional nicknames are big mistakes.”
“Domains are important, especially in technology-related fields,” Lifehacker found. “An AOL address might be just as serviceable as any other address when it comes to sending and receiving mail but to most people in tech fields it says ‘Hi. I’m from 1996. What is this Internet you speak of?’”
Businesses should have their own domain and personalized email, according to Lifehacker. “SomeCompany@sbcglobal.net or SomeDude2049@yahoo.com were huge turn offs to readers and many expressed that they would question the professionalism of a company with such an unpolished image and do business elsewhere.”
You can read more of the poll results here.
With IDC Research finding that 97 billion messages are sent in the world each day, email remains one of the largest perceived security risks to companies. IDC’s report also noted that 80 percent of an organization’s operational records are stored within the email infrastructure.
A recent survey now shows that employers generally see regular employees as the major abusers. Sophos, a Boston-based supplier of IT security solutions in 150 countries, conducted a web poll of employers that asked, “Which user exposes you to the greatest threat?”
Forty-four percent of employers said standard employees posed the biggest threat. Mobile employees were a distant second at 19 percent, contractors were 14 percent, remote access users at 12 percent and guests at 11 percent.
“Email is now central to the day-to-day operation of practically all organizations, regardless of size or sector,” according to the Sophos report. “Yet, while it is far too important to lock down, email poses a large enough risk where it cannot be left unregulated, especially as nearly all employees expect a certain level of personal email use while at work.”
When people are overworked and stressed out, it’s always good to bring up pointers on how to avoid fights — just in case. Ed Muzio of Group Harmonics recently made some fine points on the topic of email.
As anyone who uses email frequently can attest, it can be fast, flexible and highly combustible. Muzio explains that the reasons predate email, going back to communications studies in the 1960s showing:
- 55 percent of communication is visual,
- 38 percent is conveyed through tone, and
- 7 percent of communication is in words.
For example, Muzio says, take this sentence in an email: “I didn’t say you have an attitude problem.”
Being an email, you don’t have visual or tone. Did the sender mean “I” didn’t say it, or that “you” don’t have the problem, or was the emphasis on “attitude,” (meaning you have a problem, it’s just not an attitude one). Depending on how the reader interprets that simple sentence, you could get anger, hurt feelings, or relief.
Instead of emailing, if you call the person on the phone, then communication becomes 7 percent words and 38 percent tone, for a vastly improved 45 percent. If you visit the person’s cubicle face-to-face, communication gains the final 55 percent in visual cues.
Because emails can be fraught with danger, Muzio advizes refraining sending them when you need to communicate emotional content or something sensitive. Stick with facts and data whenever possible.
After launching a contest challenging hackers to break into its Web mail system, StrongWebmail.com must award the $10,000 prize a few days after launching the contest.
This was their challenge:
“StrongWebmail.com is offering $10,000 to the first person that breaks into our CEO’s email account…and to make things easier, we’re giving you his username and password. There’s just one catch: to access a StrongWebmail.com email account, the account’s owner must receive a verification call on his pre-registered phone number. So even though you have our CEO’s username and password, you still have some work to do because you don’t have access to his telephone.”
This was the result:
A team of hackers managed to hack into StrongWebmail CEO Darren Berkovitz’s Web mail account, using what’s known as a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack, the company confirmed Monday. “They did it using an XSS script that took advantage of a vulnerability in the backend webmail program,” StrongWebmail said in a statement.
Apparently, the hackers found the Web flaw within a minute, and then spent about six hours perfecting their attack.
StrongWebmail said it was “not deterred” by the contest’s quick conclusion and would be launching a new competition once this bug was fixed.
To their credit, StrongWebmail has a link to this article on their home page, which also touts “The most secure email accounts on the planet.”
To read more of the PCWorld article, click here.
Let’s say you leave a company and discover two years later that the company is keeping your former company email address active. A reader of TechRepublic.com recently asked about that interesting situation, so the head blog editor, Toni Bowers, sought an answer from Lawrence Graves, a partner in the New Hampshire-based firm of Coolidge & Graves, specialists in intellectual property law. Here’s how Atty. Graves answered:
“The company/employer owns all data on its hardware, including email archives. The employee has no rights at all in his e-mail identity. Ordinarily, as a courtesy, employers tend to keep old accounts active for a limited time in order to avoid rejecting business-related communications, and forward personal emails to the former employee. There would potentially be an issue if the employer used the former employee’s email to perpetuate a false impression that the employee remained with the company, but simply mining the incoming traffic is certainly within the employer’s rights.”
If you find yourself in this situation, you might want to contact the company in the event that somebody there simply forgot to disable your old email address. Stranger things have happened.
