Although email is an essential business tool for today we all get too much. At some point many people become overwhelmed by the amount of email received and need to deal with. At this point email actually becomes an impediment to doing business. It actually makes getting things done harder.

So what can you do? Here a few suggestions that may assist you getting back in control of your inbox.

First and foremost place a much higher value on your inbox. Determine whether what appears in there should really appear there. Does it make the inbox more or less valuable? Mostly it will be less valuable. Things such as email newsletters should either be unsubscribed from or routed to a sub folder using rules. Unsubscribing to all that stuff you once thought would be of interest but in fact you have never looked at really has no value being in your inbox, so either route it away or unsubscribe.

If there are really things in your inbox that you want to save, don’t leave them to fester in your inbox, create a subfolder called archive and move those emails there. Getting email away from your inbox makes it much easier to focus on the tasks at hand rather than being distract by older emails that you know you really should do something with.

If there are emails from which you are waiting for replies on or need to reference in the short term, create another folder called follow up and move these there. Again, moving these ‘waiting on’ emails to another location removes from your direct sight and again allows you to focus on what is most current.

Finally, be pragmatic and go through your emails and delete emails that provide little value. if you need to keep that one snippet of information then maybe copy and paste just that component into something like OneNote. Don’t simply keep an email because there is one small part that has value. Be ruthless with your pruning efforts and ask yourself whether you really, really, really need that email.

Your inbox should be much cleaner now. Consider creating standard email rules to route non critical emails to subfolders where you can deal with them when you have less priorities. Everything you receive in your inbox is not important the second it arrives there. You may also want to consider a rule that automatically moves CC’ed mail out of your inbox. If the email wasn’t addressed to you directly it will probably have a lower priority and may not need addressing at all. Having a good understanding of how your email programs works and of the features it includes is a very factor in becoming more productive. Spend some time sharpening your axe, you won’t regret it.

For many of emails sent between you and your colleagues consider whether email is really the best mechanism for collaboration. Tools like OneNote and SharePoint provide a central location for a wide range of information that can easily be shared with others. Utilizing these tools also makes it very easy to bring new members into the team rather than forwarding a raft of previous correspondence that they need to become familiar with. Another option to consider maybe social media tools whether public like Twitter and Facebook or private ones like Yammer.

However, the key is to place a higher value on your inbox and effectively your time. Utilizing the features that come with programs like Outlook can help you keep your emails under control but that makes little difference if you don’t place a value on your inbox.

What do you do with old emails? What does a business do with emails from ex-employees? Emails are a very important part of the communications of a business and may need to be retained for compliance reasons. However, does your business have a policy and procedure for what to do?

When it comes to managing your own personal emails, how do you handle that? Do you have a process or do you simply allow them to accumulate? Like any data, best practice would be to create some archiving facility.

What you may not be aware of is that Outlook already has a built in archiving process that you can take advantage of. In most cases it is disabled but it is simple enough. Just right mouse click on your inbox for example and select Properties from the menu that appears. In the dialog box that now appears you will see an AutoArchive tab.

By default, the option will be set to not archive items. You can change that to either take settings from the default settings (normally set on the Exchange server) or you can configure your own settings. If you elect to use your own settings then, by default, items that are older than 6 months will be moved to an archive folder.

You can select from a number of different options when it comes to archiving and importantly you can enforce these settings from the server for all users. It is very important that your organization does have an archiving policy to handle the growth of emails over time. Working with mailboxes full of emails can be extremely hard and extends the amount of time required to do any sort of maintenance.

The issues around size of email is normally related to attachments. Restrictions can also be applied here if required to keep this in check. You can for example limit how large user attachments are as well as limiting the amount of space a users mailbox can consume.

It is important that you don’t allow your email systems to grow out of control to the point where they become to difficult and cumbersome to maintain. This means that you need to put policies in place to provide this control and this is certainly something Correct Solutions can assist with so contact us for more information.

Microsoft recently announced that it is bundling three products together into a single license. Office 365, Windows 10 and Information Protection are now available as a single bundle in enterprise and business offerings called Microsoft 365. The great thing about these new bundles is that they are not that much more expensive that stand-alone Office 365 plans.

Here’s how Microsoft 365 delivers even more value

Having all these common products rolled into a single subscription makes purchasing and allocation very easy. You can upgrade from any existing standalone Office 365 plan.

The greatest benefit, however, is the additional functionality:

• With Windows 10 from Microsoft Office 365 you get much greater control over the devices that the software is installed on. You get improved deployment and management abilities as well.
• The Information Protection piece allows you to better protect your data no matter where it resides. Whether on your device, in Office 365 or sent to others, Information Protection can help ensure that you retain full control of that information at all times.

Microsoft 365 comes in plans for large and small businesses and – like Office 365 – is a per user, per month cost. And, for a small incremental cost, you can get a range of new features and enablements via Windows 10 and Information Protection. These allow your business to be more productive, efficient and secure.

Of course, we also expect to see more features rolled into Microsoft 365 as time progresses, but there won’t be an increase cost for users –  it is all part of the subscription. How cool is that?

If your business is now looking to driving even more value from the Microsoft Cloud,  it is time to consider Microsoft 365.

Watch Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft announce Microsoft 365 in the below short video.

These days, email is an essential communication tool for businesses; there is no way to escape it. Whilst working on your computer, you might run into a common problem: the email spam filter blocks an important communication, or a tender gets lost in the recipients junk email folder. As a result, you might miss out on responding in time, which naturally in return can cause other issues. For this reason you may be tempted to ask your IT team to whitelist the sender address which is often a dangerous thing to do.

Whitelisting is the process of adding a specific email address (or even their whole domain name) to an exception list in your email system. The list can then bypass all the filtering rules in your system. This means that any email coming from that address will no longer be checked for bad links, bad attachments, or any other malware. Even if you know the senders, it doesn’t mean you can trust them 100% for never being hacked. Indeed, it is quite simple for malicious actors to send emails appearing to be from someone else without having their password. For instance, you’ll have no chance to know that the email you just received asking you to update billing details or to buy $1000 worth of gift cards is fake or not.

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol or SMTP is the name used for an email communication protocol. It has been designed so that anyone can send emails to any servers using any addresses, and with the maximum delivery. Therefore, the only thing stopping malicious actors from sending an email on your behalf to your customers is THEIR spam filter as well as some configurations on your side. These configurations relate to specific records (DNS) that are controlled by your IT team. When correctly configured, those records inform the Internet and other mail systems to only accept emails coming from your verified systems and thus reject all others.

Anti-spam systems range from simple to over-the-top complex but they all exist to protect you and your organisation from malware & viruses, not just spam. When an email gets blocked, it is always for a reason. Sometimes the reason is a false-positive (where an email was identified as bad but is actually good). However, instead of whitelisting the sender’s address forever and opening up holes in your security, it is preferable to ask your IT team to investigate the reason further so they can resolve the issue some other way.

To conclude, whitelisting should ONLY be used as a last resort because it represents too many risks in terms of IT security. Get your IT team involved to help ensure your DNS records are up to scratch and prevent malicious actors from pretending to be you.

The post The danger of Whitelisting, or why should you learn to stop worrying and love spam filters appeared first on Correct Solutions.