Summary: This blog is powered by Net2Secure, which explains why every organization needs a strong email policy. It covers how clear email rules help prevent phishing and ransomware, protect brand reputation, and ensure compliance, while showing how Net2Secure’s secure email services help enforce these policies effectively.
No matter the size of your organization, Email is one of the most used tools in each organization. Even with the rise and increasing popularity of quick messaging and collaboration tools, email indeed plays a vital role in the majority of organizations. It conveys a fast way to communicate with employees, clients, partners, and suppliers.
For all of its benefits, unless your email system is properly secured and managed, it poses significant security risks that can be harmful to your organization. Threats continue to target email with numerous phishing and ransomware operations in an effort to obtain or corrupt information for extortion objectives, making email security policy a top priority for IT security staff.
It is crucial to secure such an essential business tool as email with a carefully thought-out email security policy. In this blog post, we would like to invite you to look more closely at what an email security policy is intended to do and how to create one.
What is Email Policy?
Email usage policy, generally known as email policy, refers to the rules and regulations that an organization mandates its users to follow while using their business email address. Members of an organization should obey the guidelines set in the email policy whenever they send emails from their corporate email address. Email usage policy will depend on one organization to another based on the business type, region, etc.
Why is an Email Policy Needed for an Organization?
It is a well-established fact that email has become the primary mode of business communication. While it is a boon to use emails for professional communication, cyber attackers exploit this opportunity to steal crucial business data and create a substantial amount of money. Having a proper email policy assists organizations in several ways:
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Secure Brand Reputation: Sharing unsuitable content through email using your organization’s email domain will decrease your domain reputation, which in turn could affect your business. Having a strict email usage policy helps ensure that all emails are sent as per the policy. Include a note in the policy stating that emails are controlled by administrators to shield the brand's reputation.
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Shield from Legal Liabilities: Strict adherence to an email usage guideline promotes constructive and fruitful communication. Keeping users informed and sending emails in accordance with the policy's guidelines guarantees that your company doesn't break any state or industry regulations. It lowers the possibility of legal problems, liabilities, or litigation against your company.
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Protecting Email Communication: Emails are prone to various cyber threats such as spam, spoofing, phishing, etc. Organizations that have a clear and precise email usage policy increase users’ confidence while communicating with their customers and prospective leads, generally when there is a need to share confidential data. The risk of data theft, accounts getting hacked, possibility of business email can all be skipped by following the email policy.
How Does Email Policy Work?
Organizations, just like any other policy, should specify their email usage policy, outlining the authorized and unauthorized email usage by users. As part of the onboarding process, employers should ensure that a user reads and signs the email policy. In this way, users are made aware of the do’s and don’ts while sending an email to their customer or even within the organization.
Based on the organization’s needs, administrators can handle the user’s email usage through email restrictions and rules. Rules can be configured with multiple conditions, such as to validate the email content, scan any unsafe links, attachments, or images, etc.
Steps to Create a Company Email Policy
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Security and Protection: This is a key point for a solid email policy. Email is the main vector of threats and attacks, so you should invest in educating your employees. Make transparent in your email policy what the main threats are and how to identify them, such as phishing and ransomware. It’s also worth investing in training and protection software for email security, such as anti-spam and a secure email gateway.
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Suspicious Content: Encourage employees to report suspicious emails. In addition, it’s recommended that someone take care to investigate and identify these suspicious messages to avoid fraud and future damage.
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Prohibitions: Set prohibitions carefully. For instance, it’s not allowed to send offensive messages, nor messages with racist and homophobic content. The company itself can be held liable depending on the severity of the case and the way the situation occurred. It is also suggested that you don’t allow employees to utilize the company’s email to sign up for tasks not related to work.
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Business Use: Although the company's email is used for business, it can occasionally be challenging to distinguish between personal and business correspondence. Establish a rule outlining how staff members should respond to private messages on the company network in your email policy.
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Compliance: Your firm may need to comply with regulations and make sure that sensitive information is kept in its proper place, depending on your industry. Therefore, specify which emails must be retained, where they must be kept, and for how long in your email policy.
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Code of Conduct: It is crucial to create a code of conduct for company emails. For instance, all email signatures must have a photo, name, and phone, and the response time to a customer’s email can’t be more than one business day.
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Awareness: Your company email policy should be available to everyone and updated often. Besides this, employees should be aware of the repercussions of violating the rules.
Conclusion
Creating an email policy is the very first step mostly businesses take. The real challenge exists in implementing, controlling, and enforcing it regularly across the organization. This is where Net2Secure, a leading web hosting and data center solutions company, comes in.
It delivers secure, enterprise-grade email solutions designed to help organizations meet their email infrastructure needs with well-defined email usage and security policies. With modern controls and automated shields, organizations can certify that their email communication remains compliant, secure, and professional at all times.
At Net2Secure, we believe that an effective email policy works best when paired with the right technology. We not only support your organization’s email policy but also actively enforce it. By integrating a clearly defined email policy with Net2Secure email infrastructure, organizations can confidently secure their data, reputation, and compliance posture in an increasingly threat-driven digital environment.
