Email security is a vitally important issue for all Notes administrators. It just so happens DominoPower Contributing Editor Mick Moignard has some experience in the field. He and colleague John Carroll share some thoughts on the topic, and in the process, offer some tips for getting the most out of their company's SecuriQ suite of security tools.

Email and messaging are vital to every business these days. Any Notes messaging administrator will tell you that means not only must the system be available, but also it must not be a hazard to the business. People must be able to trust it. They must trust not just that it will deliver their business mail, but that it will protect the business from as many hazards as possible.

Right off the bat, we should declare an interest. Our company sells a suite of add-on tools, called GROUP SecuriQ, for Notes mail. These are add-ons designed to enable Notes administrators to deliver an email system that can be trusted. This suite is not a silver bullet; merely installing the tools doesn't deliver everything. You have to configure them to match the requirements of your Corporate Security Policy, to meet and match the threats that you've already defined for your business.

In this article, we'll take a look at some of those threats, and some of the things that you might do to guard against them. Along the way, we'll talk about how to get the most out of the GROUP SecuriQ family of tools and how it can help you address some of these security concerns.

So what are the threats? Let's just list a few.

• Viruses in attached files;

• Malicious payloads in the email itself, such as mail-bombs, Trojan Horses, and the like;

• SPAM;

• Breaches of corporate confidentiality: employees divulging sensitive information;

• Breaches of etiquette such as bad language, pornography, sexist, racial, or personal remarks;

• Transmission of excessively large files and other denial of service attacks;

• Access to unencrypted information in email by unauthorized people;

• Commercial risks such as the potential legal liability that an injudicious email may give you;

• Private, non-business, email traffic.

Viruses
Everyone knows about the viruses in attachments issues. Most Notes administrators know that there are a variety of products available to deal with virus-infected attachments, and our product set will do that too.