No doubt you have experienced email problems in some form or another recently. This can be extremely frustrating when you are trying to run a modern business, as we are all reliant on email in our daily work. So what do you do?
The sad fact is that email services are under constant attack by hackers, spammers, cyber criminals and even terrorists. These individuals will go to great lengths to disrupt business services, and have become extremely skilled.
The many internet service providers are doing their best to block the cyber-attacks and protect you from the impact, but sometimes a hacker slips past the defences. This can result in a brief interruption of services, but in some instances could be more serious and last longer.
Here are a few tips to reduce the impact of being without your normal email services for a while:
- First of all, check your internet connection. Email just doesn’t work when you are offline.
- Read the email error message. In some cases there is actually no problem, you are just being informed of a delay or an incorrect email address.
- Report the problem to your service provider using their normal support logging procedures. Make sure to get a reference number or some sort of acknowledgement.
- Supply as much details as you can. This includes a description of the exact error message you receive, the length of time that you have experienced the problem and even a copy of an email error report if available. This will help the technical people find the problem much faster.
- Set up an alternative email address right now with a different service provider, like Gmail for example. Although not ideal, this does give you the ability to communicate while the tecchies are resolving the problems.
- Synchronise and backup your email regularly so that you can still work offline on your computer.
- Make sure you understand how to access your email account online. Most email services give you a webmail option so you don’t have to rely only on Outlook and other PC/Mac based email programs.
- Make sure that your email passwords (and all other passwords for that matter) are hard to crack. The password should be at least 8 characters and constitute a random combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, as well as numbers and special characters.
- Be careful who you trust your cell phone or tablet with. If you use these devices for email, it is easy for a criminal to gain access to your email and all your contacts as well.
- Check through your spam and junk filters on a regular basis. Due to heightened security ‘proper’ emails sometimes end up there.
Not sure how to do this?
If you are not sure how this applies to your unique circumstances or how to get started, please contact us and we will be happy to share some further thoughts with you.
