Summary of E-Mail Security

E-mail security should be a focal point for any business or organization. Much of your critical data is likely stored within e-mail, and because of its nature, e-mail is heavily portable outside of your organization. Not only can e-mail be automatically forwarded to external mail accounts, which may have poor security, but also the archive formats used by Microsoft Outlook have historically weak security allowing for easy password cracking or removal by attackers. By exploiting e-mail archives, hackers can gain critical insight into your business. However, this can mostly be mitigated through retention policies and prevention of archives. By preventing the creation of archives and reducing the retention time for individual e-mail messages, companies can greatly reduce the amount of information that could be leaked out.