The Internet unquestionably has become the business communications tool of choice. Its immense popularity has spawned by one estimate 275 million corporate mailboxes. Other estimates say 60 percent of today's critical business data is transmitted via e-mail.

Unfortunately, the Internet can be just as dangerous as it is ubiquitous. The contents of e-mails have been used as evidence in numerous court cases. And, as many may or may not know, deleting an e-mail doesn't necessarily make it vanish. In most cases, it can be recovered. So, the e-mail you save can hurt you. The e-mail you delete can still hurt you.

	TIP: Office Outlook 2003 provides the new Read all standard mail in plain text option that permits you to view all e-mail messages in plain text format. If you are concerned about the threat of a virus or of some other type of malicious script released through e-mails that use fancier formatting such as HTML or Rich Text Format (RTF), you can use this option to prevent Outlook 2003 from rendering those formats. Learn more.

Sound E-mail Policies and Software Offer Protection
Sound employee e-mail policies and good software can help protect you from embarrassment, theft, loss of business and court appearances — not to mention loss of revenue, productivity and — worst case — your business.

More than one computer security expert has said the only secure computer is one that is turned off. But businesses can't turn their computers off anymore than they can go back to pencil, paper and snail mail.

Smart e-mail management practices and policies will help protect against lawsuits, stolen trade secrets and just plain embarrassment. For instance, consider a policy that outlines which e-mails to save and which to discard. In addition, you should look to your business software programs to help protect your internal and external communications.

The first question is how are you going to save the e-mails you deem to be significant business records? This is critical if you use e-mail to transmit information such as contracts and company policies. Those are the kinds of information regulatory agencies could ask you to produce. Can you access specific information quickly and readily, indexed by date, sender/recipient or subject matter? If not, you should consider automated e-mail archiving.

Business software that helps you regularly organize e-mails can help make life easier — and safer — as well. Microsoft Office Small Business Edition 2003 is tailored to the needs of small business owners and their employees. Utilizing the already familiar but much improved Outlook 2003 is one way to exercise daily control over your growing e-mail flow. For instance, it offers:

• Search Folders which can be used to group messages by sender or date, or group them by conversational threads.



• Junk e-mail filtering which can be customized to be more or less aggressive



• Safe Senders List, which allows you to accept messages from senders only you designate.



• Blocked Senders List, which routes senders you block to junk mail. This feature also will block unwanted attachments and large files from senders not on your Safe Senders List.

Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager, while geared to business contacts, also is a welcome organizational tool. The Business Contact Manager allows users to automatically link e-mails, appointments, notes and tasks to business contacts and sales opportunity records.

While all of these features may not strictly relate to organizing your e-mails, the less junk and uninvited mail you have, the better. It also goes without saying that better organized records are going to be better protected records.

Small business owners who don't have the deep pockets of larger corporations may be the hardest hit by the consequences of e-mail misconduct or mismanagement.

How to Minimize Your Risk
There are, however, steps the small business owner/manager can take to minimize risk. A clear, well-written, enforceable policy that specifies acceptable and unacceptable e-mail practices and content is critical. Content that is offensive, inappropriate, and legally actionable or otherwise damaging to your business should be spelled out. Your employees need to know that an e-mail is much more than a water cooler conversation.

If employee workstations are to be monitored, that should be spelled out in the policy, as well. In other words, employees should be told if their activities are going to be monitored and why. Some companies don't address the issue of using company equipment to conduct personal business on the Internet. Others expressly forbid it.

In the United States, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 allows companies to consider all e-mails sent or received on company equipment as company property. Do you know if that's the case in your country, too? It's worth investigating.

Your e-mail policies should be reviewed regularly to ensure they are in compliance with current statutes — and those can vary from one jurisdiction to the next.

Software Should Help Protect Your Communications
The software programs your business uses should help you protect your company by protecting your internal and external Internet communications. Most software programs geared for business include varying levels of security and privacy features, firewalls, junk mail filters and the like.

Microsoft Office Small Business Edition 2003 offers two key features for privacy and protection that require little input from you. Encryption and digital signing will go a long way toward preventing unauthorized access to and interference with electronic correspondence:

• The encryption feature encodes transmitted data to prevent unauthorized access. It is unreadable to everyone but its intended recipient. The feature is easily turned on and off in Outlook.



• Outlook also offers digital signature capability. Digital signing authenticates a message. It establishes the identity of the sender, sort of an electronic ID badge. Outlook will direct users to a Microsoft website for information about obtaining digital signatures.

What makes the Small Business Edition attractive is the combination of business-friendly features, encryption and digital signing, and the program's instantly recognizable — and familiar — Office environment. The program also offers the capability of reading and, with permission, modifying e-mails that have been protected through Microsoft's Information Rights Management (IRM) program.

Sound communication management policies, well-organized information and flexible, full-featured, easy-to-use software can make a difference in how well you're able to manage your business — and how well you're able to protect it.