I run across small businesses all the time who have employees using personal email accounts to receive work related email. Doing this can hurt your organization in several ways, and compromise your business security. Here’s why it is in your best interest to set up work email accounts for each one of your employees:

#1: It’s inexpensive.  I’ve set up accounts for my clients that were included with their domain or hosting package at no charge!  These types of accounts do have email storage, and can be accessed via a Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook account.

#2: It’s consistent with your business’s branding.  If you were dealing with ABC Company, or Gotham City, wouldn’t you feel like you were getting more of a professional response if the email response came from the same domain name as the company or city? For example: “john.doe@gothamcity.org” is a much more legit email address than, “cutsiename223@hotmail”.

#3 It creates difficulties with security and viruses: Personal email accounts are often used by employees for things beyond personal correspondence: signing up on websites, ecommerce and more. By allowing your employees to also use these accounts at work, these addresses may leave your sensitive data and files open to viruses and other malware. Because a personal email is being used for everything from registration for websites and services to shopping and any other sort of personal online activity, you may be inviting hackers to penetrate your work email system.

Email packages are easy to use, and not very expensive, to set up. Also, and perhaps more importantly, if an employee leaves your organization, the passwords can be changed and sensitive content stays within the organization, rather than going out with, and continuing to be sent to, ex-employees. Here’s some email address examples: john.doe@mybusiness.com or don.joe@mycity.org. People like to have a specific person to email in an organization, and this is a good way to accomplish this. Alternatively, another option is to have a specific, yet name generic addresses like: mayor@mycity.com or hr@mybusiness.com.

There is a couple of ways that this can be accomplished: First, if you already have a domain and website hosted with a company like GoDaddy, there are email packages for little or no monthly cost.  In some cases, simply having an address that forwards to your existing email would be appropriate.

Google Apps for business is another tool that gives you a business email address and mailbox, in addition to other Google apps.  If you have claimed your Google Places page, and/or your Google+ page, your business already likely has an account, and Google Apps for business (with email) can be set up quickly, and have the full benefits of Gmail.

Organized, controlled and safe. You don’t have to have employees using personal email accounts in your business.  If you have any questions about how to make a solution for you,  Email me (at my business email) tim@quartzlightmarketing.com, or fill out this quick form below.