UK businesses threatened by email melt-down as employees send holiday photos and videos

Thousands of small businesses are in danger of their email systems collapsing as employees heading off on summer breaks send and receive holiday photographs and even videos as huge email attachments.

British messaging and collaboration software company Softalk says that small and medium sized businesses are particularly vulnerable as they don't have large IT departments to manage and monitor their email systems.

"For many small and medium sized businesses email is now as important if not more important than phone calls and traditional post," said Simon Bates, director of Softalk. "Yet many businesses are relying on old email systems that they first implemented when email first became widely available and before it became a business critical system."

Softalk says that businesses can take some simple steps to ensure the integrity of their email systems:

• Use the email server to set limits for maximum size of attachments that can be sent and received
• Set quotas for individual users mailboxes to prevent employees using the email server for storing hundreds of megabytes of personal photographs and videos
• Use the email server to prevent users from sending or receiving certain types of attachment
• Install up to date anti-virus filters to prevent viruses slipping through disguised as holiday pictures
• Install anti-spam filters to cut down on the amount of unproductive email clogging up users in-boxes
• Implement anti-virus and anti-spam security at the email server level so that you can always ensure that filters are up to date without the need to update every individual user’s PC
• Have clear policies in place so that employees understand how they are allowed the company email system for personal use
• Ensure that policies include rules to ensure that employees don’t send or receive inappropriate images
• Check that your email server is robust enough and has the capacity to cope with the demands of today’s email traffic which has increased from an average of 15 billion emails a day in 2001 to an average of 132 billion a day in 2005.
• Ensure that you are backing up and archiving your email database on a frequent and regular basis

About Softalk

Softalk provides a range of messaging, collaboration and CRM software solutions specifically developed to benefit small to medium sized businesses. Softalk was set up in 1993 and is a privately held company headquartered in Maidenhead in the UK with a US office in New York. Customers include American Express, British Chamber of Commerce, British Transport Police, Cancer Research UK, Cap Gemini France and Xerox. Its other products include Workgroup Mail, an email server for small businesses; and Workgroup Share to enable organisations to share Outlook folders without the need for Microsoft Exchange.