Using Personal Email For Business

Using Personal Email Account For Business

Email allows for easy transfer of documents and other information to colleagues, business partners and customers world-wide. But are you using a personal Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail account for business purposes?  Using a free email service can damage your business’s reputation with the following risks.

It may seem easier and cheaper to use a free email account. However using a personal email in a  business environment can pose many risks. There are many reasons people turn to personal email for business. Some of the reasons are money, file attachments, size limitations, and no access to your company email network from home.Using a free email service can damage your business’s reputation with the following risks.

Security Risks of Using Your Personal Email

• Under a free email service account providers are under no obligation to guarantee service uptime, backups, support, security or governance for your business email.
• By sharing company information over personal email, you are allowing confidential information to be mined and searched.
• If your employees are also using a free email service, the account and information within it leaves with the employee if they leave the business.
• It’s easier to have dangerous computer viruses be distributed via email. These virus can violate customer privacy.
• Behaviors like not utilizing good practices when creating email passwords can cause sensitive data and information to be read by others on or intercepted by cyber criminals.
• Information sent over a free email service allows permission for the NSA to search and retrieve these messages, violating your customers’ privacy.
• Inability to have a strong anti-spam filtering service implemented can cause a slight annoyance to productivity to a major security threat.
• Free email addresses lack company credibility and professionalism.
• All business data goes to the cloud, jumbled in with other user data. There is no guarantee on security and compliance. This can present legal risk to your company.
• Personal email accounts can be close at anytime, by the provider, without warning.
• With personal free email service, your company information is being stored on mail servers outside of your company’s control. Your data can be stored and transmitted anywhere around the world.

Stop risking your small business because the cost of having free email service. Start handling your business email by using your own domain hosted email account.