It is so tempting to use your work email for personal use and lets face it, you’ve all probably done it. I have! From sending a joke, signing up to a newsletter or joining a community etc. Now the line gets quite blurred if that community is linkedin or a similar business connectivity service.

Here are some of the problems you are faced with:

• Possible increased spam or phishing emails.
• Breaking company policy regarding email use.
• Email snooping by bosses (it happens).
• Identity theft.
• Lose of money.
• You leave the company.
• The company goes bust.

Now forgive me, but I am not going to cover the first three today.

So what happens to your email account when you leave the company? Chances are it is forwarded to your line manager for a while. Standard procedure at many places. This allows the manager to tie up any lose ends that you might of missed or to quickly respond to business contacts who were not aware you left or forgot.

This actually opens the door for identity theft or for someone to go snooping! Consider how the majority of password reminders work for online services…. they send an email! The only problem is you can’t receive it anymore and some once the email has been sent often don’t have further security to verify you. Regardless whether your ex-line manager is a lovely person and wouldn’t do such a thing, you are reliant on people currently within the organisation or working for the organisation in the future not to take advantage if you don’t log in quickly and change the contact details or have not already shut the account down. How would they find out you are signed up to services? Many send periodic newsletters via email.

Okay you’ve gathered I am not exactly being mr cheerful today. Now the next situation is quite unlikely to happen, but I wouldn’t put it past people. You sign up for a service or two, the company goes bust and down the line someone buys the domain. They setup the email to do ‘catch all’ and et voila they are receiving all emails sent to that domain and again can cause problems. Often a domain will get tied up for quite a while if a business goes bust, before it can be repurchased, this will work in your favour.

Now the first question you might and should be asking is…..why?! Why bother, why steal my identity, read my messages and look at my data? Well depending on the online services people could place orders for products, transfer money, harvest contacts, use your identity for whatever reasons they have. The fact is since the dawn of time people have been clubbing each other, stealing and in the current day and age sometimes the methods are more subtle.

So the tips:

• Stick to using your personal email address for non-work newsletters,forums,mailing lists,services, buying personal items etc
• Don’t use your company email address to send jokes or ‘warnings’ that people send each other that are not company sensitive.
• Before actually leaving a company, close accounts or unsubscribe to services you don’t use anymore on behalf of the company. Again newsletters, mailing lists, forums etc. Could someone resign up and pretend to be you? Sure, but make it harder please.
• Know what you are signed up to. Easier said than done I know.
• Never use a work email address for your personal ebay, paypal, facebook and similar services.
• If you are the owner of a business make sure you are the actual owner of the domain you use and consider buying the domain for longer periods of time.

Now the above tips don’t fully protect you and I welcome feedback in the comments to improve upon this post.

By now you’ve realised I can be quite paranoid! However I hope this post has made you think about how you and your company manage your email accounts and take steps to improve guidelines and practices.

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Well, for starters, there are some things the iPhone can do that the Blackberry can’t. The biggest of these is the 3rd party apps; coding for the Blackberry is done in Java, a complex and difficult language to use, whereas the iPhone has a simple Software Development Kit (SDK) available to anyone for free that nearly anyone can pick up and learn in a couple hours (note that while the SDK is free, a fee of $99 must be paid to be added to the list of App Store developers and to actually submit your app to the app store). This allows for great programs, such as Evernote, Oracle, etc to the ported for the iPhone in a short amount of time. The app store gives the iPhone a huge heads up over the Blackberry, simply because apps to boost productivity and simplify your mobile workflow can be designed for the iPhone in much less time and a lot less money.

Despite the positive qualities of the iPhone and the massive potential locked in the app store, the Blackberry simply does some things better or faster then the iPhone currently can. One of these things is email. All small business owners know that email is one of your primary forms of communication with clients and employees in this day and age, and the Blackberry, for years now, has simply been able to manage your inboxes in more powerful ways then the iPhone can. Regardless of the fact that the iPhone can display full HTML emails, whereas the Blackberry can’t in some cases, the Blackberry’s inbox management tools completely trump those of the iPhone, which is a huge downside.

Another thing the Blackberry has always been good with is stability. Simply because their apps are painstakingly written in a difficult language by professional coders and scaled specifically for the Blackberry, the apps running on that platform are infinitely faster and less crash or hang prone then iPhone apps tend to be. Even key components of the iPhone, such as SMS and Safari, cause the unit to crash or lag for long periods of time before they can be used, which raises the question of how these apps have been passed for official use on the device. Along with the instability of core applications built into the iPhone OS, most 3rd party apps are prone to lag and crashes as well. I speak from experience when I say you’ll be lucky to survive a single day on the iPhone without seeing an app crash.

The reasons for these problems is still unknown, but it is rumored Apple is working on a fix slotted for a September release, that will also bring more new features such as background notifications to the OS.

One last point I would like to discuss is security. The Blackberry has always been a corporate standard and therefore, its security systems are much stronger and built to last. The iPhone, despite its security mechanisms, such as the unlock code and autolock timer, has recently been bashed with numerous security flaws that allow a malicious user to bypass the unlock code system entirely and gain complete access to Safari, your Mail, and your entire Address Book, simply by pressing the Emergency Call button and tapping Home twice. Issues like this are almost unheard of on the Blackberry, and some of these issues are massive letdowns for small business owners looking to utilize some amazing 3rd party apps for their business.

My conclusion, however biased I am about Apple products, is a clear one: the Blackberry is still the best and the most secure means of being productive on the go. The iPhone may look cool and have the app store, but its constant bugs, lag, crashes and security flaws turn me off of using this device to keep in contact with clients and other business contacts or for working on the go. Hopefully Apple’s future Software Updates, which they are good at providing to fix issues like this, will fix some of the iPhone’s big problems, but until the security vulnerabilities and slow device performance is fixed, the Blackberry will still be my number 1 choice for small business mobility.

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• It’s free!
• It allows multiply profiles.
• It has inbuilt newsgroup and rss support.
• You can add various add ons to improve functionality.
• The Junk (spam) mail inbuilt facility is excellent and you can train it.
• Thunderbird can run on different operating systems… thus meaning if your team use different operating systems they all can use Thunderbird and it is very easy to transfer mail accounts from one os to another.

Recommended Add ons:

• I use the ‘lightning’ add on for calendar and task list support within Thunderbird.
• I use the ‘Fox Clocks’ add on that displays Cities or Countries around the world at the bottom. So it easy for me to see what time it is in a location where a business colleague is.
• The ‘Contacts Sidebar’ makes it easier for me to manage my address book.

It is a mature email client that I would recommend over Microsoft Outlook any day of the week. In small business you have to watch costs and using Thunderbird is a good start in my humble opinion.

http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/

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Thunderbird http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/

Thunderbird is an excellent email client that many use instead of Microsoft Outlook. It has a great selection of addons that can further expand its functionality and features. Suggested addons: Contacts sidebar, Foxclocks and Ligthning. These give you better management of contacts, world clocks and calendar functionality.

Open Office http://www.openoffice.org/

The mature and very usable Open Office suite of packages is a fantastic alternative to Microsoft Office. Providing functionality and features that go beyond most small business requirements. It can also export to Microsoft Word, Excel and PDF formats among others.

Scribus http://www.scribus.net/

An excellent desktop publishing package ideal for any startup to quickly and cheaply produce leaflets and posters.

Dia http://live.gnome.org/Dia

A nice nifty application to help you draw your diagrams. Ideal for great flow charts etc and exports to various graphics formats. Easy to incorporate into your other work if required.

Gimp http://www.gimp.org/

Although I’ve not spent much time with it, I’ve found it ideal to quickly edit graphics. Many obviously perfer Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. However as it doesn’t cost anything and has quite a few features it is more than enough for a lot of small businesses.

Skype http://www.skype.com/

The popular VoIP service. Ideal for business colleagues working in different locations to reduce overheads for instance. Has conference call features and more. I’ve used this for years and always have been impressed by the quality of calls and features you get for free. You can then decide whether you want to pay for extra features such as calling non-skype users, have an answer phone or even a phone number assigned to your skype account. Well worth a look.

Firefox http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Firefox for many is a great alternative to Internet Explorer. The tab browsing, impressive amount of regular updates, addons, correctly displaying html code etc has made this a popular browser.

FileZilla http://filezilla-project.org/

For those who require regular ftp access to a server, FileZilla is a great ftp client. It also is regular updated, easy to use with drag and drop features, site manager among other features.

If you know of a free application that is ideal for small businesses to run on both Linux and Windows, please tell us!

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