Personal Email Vs. Corporate Email
Email allows users to quickly and conveniently exchange electronic messages with only a few keystrokes or touch-screen gestures. Though email has become a nearly universal communication tool, a number of differences separate the use of the technology in personal and corporate settings.
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Technology
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Email, whether corporate or personal, relies on a number of common technologies. Some common transfer protocols include the Post Office Protocol, commonly known as POP, Internet Message Access Protocol, or IMAP, and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, or SMTP. Though corporate and personal email services rely on these technologies for moving messages between users, corporate email administrators may choose to deploy more advanced technologies. Many corporations, according to the official Push Email website, rely on Push technology to keep corporate users continuously connected. While more traditional protocols require the user's device to query the mail server every few minutes, push allows the user's laptop or mobile device to notify the corporate server that it would like to receive instant notices of new messages. When a new message arrives, the server immediately transfers the message to the user without the long wait associated with more traditional personal email services.
Security
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Corporate emails often contain sensitive and proprietary information that must remain within the corporate domain. For this reason, according to security experts at Zix Mail Encryption, corporate email administrators often use the latest technologies and encryption algorithms to guard against information loss and theft of intellectual property. Many corporate email servers encrypt messages so that only users on the company network can open them, but this level of encryption rarely finds its way into the personal realm. According to the technology company Basin Broadband, personal email transfer protocols such as POP and IMAP simply facilitate the exchange of email between servers and clients in plain formats; these technologies do not provide or support their own encryption algorithms.
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Access
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Personal email users often enjoy easy access to their messages. For this reason, many personal email accounts support access through the World Wide Web, from mobile devices and IMAP or POP exchange with email client applications on the user's computer. The level of security required for corporate email often prohibits such ubiquitous access, and many corporations allow access only from authorized computers directly connected to the company's internal network. As technology changes, though, some corporations have eased their requirements for email access. According to a 2010 article on MSN Money Central, some major financial corporations have experimented with allowing employees to retrieve corporate email from less secure mobile phones than those previously supported under company policy.
Considerations
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The change in technology accompanies a change in user attitudes, as indicated by a February 2011 survey conducted by the technology organization Digital Trends. In that study, the organization found that an increasing number of young corporate employees use their own personal email accounts to send and receive corporate and work-related emails. This type of activity may present a challenge for corporate email administrators tasked with ensuring information security, as corporations have no control over emailed information once it leaves the secured corporate network.
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References
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