Remote work and email-the blessing and curse
February 5, 2008 by Tris Hussey
Filed under Business
You work at home like I do? How’s that firewall and router? Opening a lot of email attachments just willy nilly? Okay that’s not me, but it turns out a lot of remote folks do. Hmm. This is a problem isn’t it? This Business Technology article is heavy on doom and gloom, but light on well what next? Also the end of the article ends with this great paragraph:
Hypocrisy alert: The Business Technology Blog likes to sound the alarm on tech-security issues, but secretly – or not-so secretly in some cases – we do several of these things ourselves. But that’s the problem: Sometimes it’s hard to reconcile the need to get work done with the need to keep things secure. If we need to get online, and if piggybacking on someone else’s wireless signal is the only way to connect, we’ll probably do it. In our defense: At least we know we’re a risk. Source: Business Technology : Remote Workers Don’t Practice Safe Computing
The answer is really simple, risk and knowledge. You have to know the risks and arm yourself with a little knowledge. At home, with locked down WiFi of course, you should be pretty safe. But you still have to be smart about it. I think we’re all smart enough to know about not opening attachments, and watching out for that stuff that comes through MSN, etc … but away from home? Well WiFi is something that is a tough one. We love it, but secure options (at least for free) aren’t common. I’m still hoping to find a simple and free VPN that I can use.
But email, let’s talk email. Wow it is a curse sometimes. This CNET article about an email goof from Eli Lilly is wow, so been there done that. Heck I know I’ve done it. I’ve caught myself from doing it too. My friend Brad over at ClearContext (which I can’t live without, btw) has an awesome tip for Outlook users (which I’ve now done) to automatically delay emails automatically:
How many times have you sent an email, only to realize just as it disappeared that you sent it to the wrong person, misspelled something in the body, forgot to include an attachment or something else of that ilk? I find that when I catch these errors, it’s always within moments of sending. From Brad at ClearContext
Now my emails have a three minute delay, unless I mark them urgent. Three minutes … not much for piece of mind, eh?
What’s your worst email story?
At my old consulting gig we lost a HUGE project when our sales guy accidentally forwarded all of the inside information he had developed on the account to the client. He realized the mistake the second after he hit send. Having that message delivery delay in place would have saved a couple of folks their jobs.