With cybercrime growing more and more sophisticated, having a robust email security program in place is mandatory.

There are several ways to approach email security, each with different benefits for small-to-medium sized businesses.

If you are looking for an email security program for your DC-area company, take a look at the options below and call Solvere One at (202) 905-2722 to learn more.

Email Encryption for Business

Encryption prevents emails from being accessed by anyone other than the sender and intended recipient.

You can use an encryption program to only encrypt messages that have specific content (attached files, personally identifiable information, etc.). Another option is to encrypt all of your outgoing email.

The challenge for most small-to-medium sized businesses is that encryption software can be complicated to the point of becoming a hindrance to efficient communication. This is why Solvere One encourages clients to apply a user-friendly email security program like Encryptics for Email.

Making Email Encryption Easy

Encryptics for Email can be used with Microsoft Outlook to secure communication with all recipients and senders. A simple software download is all that is needed for outside parties to have their replies encrypted. This program also allows you to subject your sent messages to certain protocols—like disallowing printing, forwarding, copying, and saving.

Companies whose employees work via mobile device or remote office can use Encryptics for Email just as easily, as also protects mobile communication and can function as the data security component of a broader Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution.

Email Security for DC, Maryland, and Virginia Businesses

Solvere One can help you determine what level and style of email security is right for your company or organization. Contact us for effective email security solutions!

More Network Security Solutions from Solvere One

• Virus and firewall protection and monitoring for business
• Secure instant messaging
• Content filtering

Get a free network security review from Solvere One!

You know a lot of people. What can you say? You’re well loved and important. That means you are also supposed to know a lot of phone numbers, email addresses, Blackberry PINs, mailing addresses, job titles, birthdays, and many other bits of information. It can be understandably difficult to remember all of this, which is why most of us don’t. Fortunately, this is one area in which computers and smart phones really make our lives easier. This article will explore some ways you can maximize Outlook and your Blackberry to keep track of all that information about all those people. We will look at what kinds of information you can store in your Contacts and the fastest, most efficient ways to get that information there.

If you want to put all that information together in one place, Outlook Contacts is ready to help. Outlook provides places for over 80 different pieces of contact information, and allows you to define your own categories of information to organize as well. The main Outlook Contact screen may look familiar, but take notice of your ability to use the drop-down menu near many of the categories to store multiple pieces of contact information in a single category. Additional email addresses and home and business addresses, for example. When entering a new Contact, always try to include a last name or a company name. Contacts with only a first name will sometimes have problems syncing properly with your Blackberry.

Outlook also gives you a place to keep many less standard pieces of contact information. The Details tab gives you access to places for potentially useful information such as nicknames, birthday, and assistant’s name. Take a look at the information Outlook is able to help you organize and decide what will be useful to you. Outlook even lets you attach a picture to each of your Contacts to help you remember who is who!

Now, you can sit down and fill out a Contact for everyone you know, but you are a busy person and you don’t have time for all that typing, right? Though manually entering all the information you want to organize is the most comprehensive way to put it all together, there are many fast and convenient shortcuts to save the info you need while on the fly.

Let’s start with what NOT to do. You may have noticed that, after you have emailed someone a few times, their email address will start to automatically pop up every time you start to type their name. What was Mr. Smith’s email address? You start to type Smith, and it pops up. It’s like magic!

Outlook’s auto-fill feature is very useful and convenient, but it is not a good way to store information. Email addresses that are only in the auto-fill will not be available on your Blackberry, or from any other computer. Also, if you have problems with your computer or get a new one, this information can be very easily lost. If you never save the email address anywhere else, what will you do when you need to email Mr. Smith from your new computer? It is for this reason that you should add every person or email address that you need to keep track of to your Outlook Contacts. Luckily, there are several very quick and easy ways to do this.

When you are addressing an e-mail, any time after Outlook has recognized it as an email address and it shows up with an underline, you can simply right-click on the address and choose Add to Outlook Contacts. It will automatically pull up a new Contact card. Enter as much or as little additional information as you want (Even a Contact with only an email address is better than not having any information saved at all.) and hit the Save and Close button. It’s that easy!

You can also do the same thing by right-clicking on the name of the sender on any email sent to you.

You can also click on an email that has been sent to you and drag it to the Contacts button on the left side of the Outlook window to create a new Contact.

If you aren’t at your desk, you also have several options on your Blackberry for accomplishing the same task. If you work for a large organization with Blackberry Enterprise Servers, you may notice that, when you compose a new email, as you start to type a name or an email address, the second line that pops up below what you are typing says “Lookup:”.  If you type the name of someone in your organization and choose this Lookup option, it will find the addresses of any person in your organization with that name and let you choose the one you want.  This is great for those times when you haven’t already added people to your contacts, but need to find them while on the run. It is less usefull when you are looking for someone with a fairly common name. Using Lookup for Smith or Kim tends to come back with too many results to be useful. It can also be a little slow to wait for the Blackberry to search the whole email system.

So that you don’t have to wait on the Lookup feature and then search through the list of options for people you email often, it is faster in the long run to add these people to your Contacts. The Blackberry makes this easy. Simply select the name of anyone that has sent you an email or the name of a person you have found using the Lookup feature, click the menu button, and there will be an option to Add to Contacts. This will add the person to your Blackberry Contacts. The next time you sync your Blackberry with Outlook it will be added to your Outlook Contacts as well. (NOTE: Ask your Systems Administrator about instant wireless syncing if you don’t have it enabled).

Now that you know several new ways to save all that valuable contact information, you can worry a little less and have more information available when you need it. Happy contacting!

Most companies and organizations have a set limit on how much space you are allotted for email. Combine that with many people wanting to save every email they ever send or receive (you never know when you’re going to need to dig it back up) and the stacks of email that a person usually gets in the average business day and mailboxes can fill up very quickly. This article is going to focus on checking your inbox size, archiving and sorting your email in Outlook and Entourage. If you’re looking to clear out your gmail inbox, here are two great articles, one from lifehacker and one from web worker daily, on giving your gmail a fresh start.

Outlook

Outlook allows you to archive and sort emails by using personal folders, which are also known as archive folders and PSTs. The terms personal folders, archive folders and PSTs are terms that can be used interchangeably, so for simplicity we will refer to them as personal folders.

To create a set of personal folders in Outlook, go to the File menu, select New, and click Outlook Data File. You will be given a choice between two types of files. Chose Office Outlook Personal Folders File (.pst). Click OK. You are then given an option of where you would like your personal folders to live. If you have space on a server, it’s a good idea to put your personal folders file there. Click on My Computer to see a list of drives available. When you’ve chosen, click OK.

Next you will be asked to name your personal folders. You can pick any name for them you’d like and you can always change the name later. Here you can add a password if you’d like, but it’s not recommended. If you lose your personal folder’s password it is difficult to recover. When you’re finished click OK.

Your personal folders will appear on the left of Outlook under your mailbox folders with the name you chose. Click the + sign to expand the folders. Here you can add more folders to organize your email. Right click and select New Folder.

Name your folder. Under “select where to put this folder” you can choose which folder you’d like to contain your new folder. The folder you right clicked to create a new folder will be the default.

Now you can archive your emails. There are two ways to do this. One option is to manually chose what emails you want to archive. In this method you drag and drop your emails directly into your personal folders. Doing one email at a time would take forever, but you can select multiple emails at once with the control (ctrl) and shift keys.

The ctrl key lets you select emails individually. Just hold down the ctrl key and select emails, then drag them into your personal folders.

The shift key selects a set of emails in a row. Select the first email you want to move, then hold down the shift key and select the last email. All the emails in-between will be selected and you can move them into your personal folders.

Your second option is AutoArchiving. To setup your AutoArchive settings, to go the tools menu, click options, and click the other tab. Click AutoArchive.

Here you can edit the auto archive settings. Choose how often you want the auto-archive to run. We recommend checking the box next to Prompt Before AutoArchive Runs so that you will know when AutoArchive is running and you can cancel it before it begins. Make sure the following boxes are checked: Archive or Delete Old Items, Show Archive Folder in Folder List, and Move Old Items to. Click the Browse button to navigate to the personal folders file you created earlier. Note that when you AutoArchive items it will create folders in your personal folders that are identical to the folders you are archiving from. So if you just have an Inbox and a Sent Items folder it will create a folder called Inbox and a folder called Sent Items in your personal folders. You can click the Run AutoArchive Now button to auto archive your files immediately.

You can also use rules to automatically archive emails when they come into your inbox. This is helpful if you belong to a mailing list or subscribe to a newsletter. See our blog entry on Outlook rules for more information.

Entourage

Archiving emails in Entourage is incredibly simple. First, expand the section under your inbox called On My Computer by clicking the triangle next to it. You can drag emails into the inbox or sent items folders here, or you can create your own folders. Create your own folders by right clicking or holding down the control key and clicking On My Computer and selecting New Subfolder.

You can create as many subfolders within subfolders as you would like.

There is no AutoArchive option for Entourage but you can move emails over manually. The command and shift keys help you select multiple emails at once:

The command key lets you select emails individually. Just hold down the command key and select emails, then drag them into your personal folders.

The shift key selects a set of emails in a row. Select the first email you want to move, then hold down the shift key and select the last email. All the emails in-between will be selected and you can move them into your personal folders.

There are many different methods for organizing your email once your folders are created. You can choose to have a different personal folder for each year, or you can have different folders for projects you are working on. Another option is the trusted trio method from LifeHacker. How you sort your email is up to you.

Having an organized inbox is just as important as keeping a clean workspace. But, if you’re getting hundreds of emails daily, it can be difficult to find time to sort through your many messages. Outlook and other email applications can help you keep your inbox tidy and highlight the important information with rules.

In Outlook, rules are a set of conditions, actions, and exceptions that process and organize messages automatically. Rules are completely customizable to your specific needs and can do many functions that help organize, customize and clean your mailbox. To create a rule for your mailbox, look in the tools menu bar for “Rules and Alerts” and open it. Here, Outlook lets you decide whether to create a rule using a pre-created template or to create a new rule from scratch. While the pre-created templates can be useful, creating a rule from scratch gives you the most flexibility and is what we recommend.

Since there are countless options for creating a rule, we will use an example to explain the process:

Say you want to create a rule that will automatically put all the emails you receive with the word “finance” in the subject into a folder labeled “Financial Information” in your personal folders. Find where it says “Start from a blank rule.” Then choose “Check messages when they arrive.” This tells Outlook to check the emails you receive as opposed to the ones you send. Click next. Check the box next to “with specific words in the subject.” Here you’re telling Outlook to look in the subject line for a specific word or phrase. Other options include looking for emails sent from a specific person, or sent to a certain email address—if you want to sort out emails that are sent to a distribution list you’re on. By clicking the blue underlined “specific words” at the bottom of the page it will let you customize which words you want to specify. Type in “finance” and click add. Now this rule will run on any email that arrives in your inbox with the word finance in the subject. Click OK to return to the previous box and click next.

Now you will designate what you want done with the emails. Check the box next to “move it to the specified folder.” You will need to specify which folder to send it to by clicking on “specified” at the bottom of the dialogue box. Choose the folder in the personal folders labeled “Financial Information” (you will need to create the folder you want the messages to go in beforehand) and click OK to set that option and then click next. This brings us to the exceptions. For the example, we’ll say that you would like this rule only to apply to those messages sent directly to me, if you are being CC’ed they will stay in your Inbox. Choose the box next to “except where my name is in the CC box” and hit next. The rule is now set up! You can now decide whether to run this rule on the emails in that are already in your inbox. This will move any emails in your inbox that follow the rule into the specified folder. You can also choose to turn on or leave it off for the time being. Rules and alerts are only active if they are checked in the “Rules and Alerts” box and the rules you set up will only be active when your Outlook is open.

There are many rules and alerts to customize and we suggest that you utilize this feature to improve efficiency and minimize your workload. For more information and tips on using rules, check out Tips for Managing Your E-Mail Using Rules from Microsoft Office Online.

Please contact us for assistance or further information for other email applications, including Entourage, Apple Mail, etc. ]]>