An emergency webmail is a temporary email service accessible online, designed to address temporary issues with the primary email server. Businesses that consider email communication as crucial to their operations should consider such a solution as indispensable.
Often, companies fail to recognize the value of an emergency webmail solution until they experience an email outage, a hacking incident, or a hosting disruptions like a fire that renders the email server inaccessible. In such cases, companies with an email business continuity plan are well-prepared, while others face significantly more challenges! So, can a company afford to overlook an email continuity solution? Let’s dive deeper into this question!
Implications of Losing Mailbox Access
Imagine being unable to access your emails or mailbox for an entire day. Your colleagues are in an open office, making phone calls, and must rely on personal email addresses to stay connected. Hard to imagine, isn’t it? Yet, it occurs more frequently than one might think.
Business email services have evolved into critical applications that are indispensable for the work tasks of many employees. The loss of mailbox access carries various consequences:
- Productivity loss: Inability to receive orders, send invoices, and communicate with stakeholders.
- Information loss: Emails received during the outage are lost, resulting in information loss.
- Difficult data recovery: Recovering lost data, particularly received emails and messages in progress, can be time-consuming or even impossible.
As a central application in businesses, email deserves a special and reliable business continuity plan (BCP). However, email services are often overlooked in comprehensive company BCPs, which is regrettable considering it is not the most complex aspect of IT security.
Emergency Webmail: How Does It Work?
An email business continuity plan involves implementing an emergency webmail system. It is a mailbox accessible through a web browser. Although its user interface may be simpler compared to traditional email services, it allows for uninterrupted work, enabling the sending and receiving of emails even when the primary email server is unavailable.
When setting up emergency webmail, companies typically define a retention period for emails, such as 7 or 14 days. This allows users to access all emails sent and received during that period in case the primary email service experiences disruptions.
Once normal operations are restored, the activities in the emergency webmail are synchronized with the main email service, ensuring that no work is lost. This is a significant advantage for employees, as they only encounter a slightly different user interface during a service outage and can continue working as usual.
Cleanmail : Antispam and Emergency-Webmail
As an expert in email services, Alinto has integrated an emergency webmail into its Cleanmail antispam solution. This enables companies to not only benefit from enhanced email communication protection, but also implement a dedicated email business continuity plan.
The implementation process is straightforward. In collaboration with Alinto’s teams, companies define the retention period for incoming, outgoing, and quarantined emails, while excluding spam messages. This webmail solution adapts to any environment and also allows for the recovery of accidentally deleted emails during the defined period.
The Alinto email BCP can be flexibly deployed, either for selected users (e.g., strategically important or heavily email-dependent employees) or for the entire email domain. Companies receive support from Alinto throughout the process.
From the company’s perspective, it is crucial to ensure that affected user accounts are connected to the emergency webmail to guarantee access to emails when needed. Cleanmail seamlessly synchronizes with the company’s directory such as Active Directory (AD) through an API, providing an additional advantage.
To prevent unprepared situations, it is essential to proactively consider potential disruptions to the email system and implement appropriate solutions. With Alinto’s Cleanmail, you can apply antispam protection to all email accounts while reserving the emergency webmail exclusively for key employees. So, are there still valid reasons to disregard an emergency webmail solution?
