Like it or not, email messages have become a crucial component of business communications in the world. Beyond its utility as a communication medium, many of us rely on archived email messages to track previously agreed-on points, or to get a quick refresher on clients that we may be communicating with, among others.
With this importance in mind, I highlight some tips that you may want to consider when implementing an email system for your small and mid-sized business.
Move away from POP
POP, or Post Office Protocol, can probably be credited as one of the key application-level protocols that facilitated the rise of email. However, being created at a time when email messages have to be “downloaded” to a standalone terminal means that it might have outlived its usefulness.
Users these days may carry as many as three devices – laptop, tablet and smartphone – that is used interchangeably for accessing the same email inbox. Moreover, they may also demand temporary, instant access from a colleague’s computer or a PC at home. Unfortunately, these are capabilities that POP does not support. To enhance email accessibility, businesses should instead look to a cloud-hosted email service, or something along the line of Exchange Server.
Sign up for a good spam filtering service
Nobody likes to receive spam, much less spend a precious 10 to 15 minutes clearing these messages from their inboxes first thing in the morning. Businesses that rely entirely on the built-in spam filtering capabilities of their email software may have realized a little secret by now: Most of them don’t work that well.
The reason is simple: Spammers conjure up new tricks all the time to get their spam into your inbox, and the programmed-two-years-ago routines in your favorite email client simply don’t cut it with them. As it is, sign up for a modern spam-filtering service, which typically share intelligence garnered from the cloud in order to effectively filter out spam messages.
Ensure emails are backed up
What would happen if you were to lose all your email messages tomorrow? Instead of having to pour in multiple tens of additional hours – and weekends – to track down client emails or calling colleagues to forward you crucial information from a previous email thread, why not just ensure that your email messages are adequately backed up?
Of course, centralized or cloud-based email systems tend to have their own backups, though it usually does not hurt to ensure that is really so. An alternative would be to tweak your backup software to include your inbox in its daily (or weekly) archiving.
Do you have additional suggestions on how businesses can better handle their email messages? Feel free to add a note in the comment section below.
