Why your business email should be you@yourdomainname.com

You probably have seen some businesses and vendors use @gmail or another form like @aol.com for their business emails. These are quick and easy to setup and can have great integrations on your phone or multiple computers. (But if you use a gmail account or any other account for personal use, do configure your multi-factor authentication.) Being quick and easy to setup, the dangers of not having a domain attached email for your business run fairly high. Below we will look at the three security issues: 

The first danger revolves around brand protection. If you don’t have a website, and operate a personal gmail account for your business, who is going to stop someone from buying a domain using your business name? When an incident like this happens, it is close to near impossible to try to resolve this issue. Especially when your business is on the line and you have to prove who you are.  

The second danger revolves around security for the receiver (you). Have you ever received an email from someone and it looks legitimate, but then you look at the address and it comes from a gmail or Hotmail account? Some email software (like gmail) will inform you that the sender “looks suspicious”. Other email handling platforms may not show. Whenever you team up with a local IT team that provides email security as well, you have the ability to flag that email for spam; it is sent directly to the spam email and the IT team will look into it. This is one of the benefits of having an IT staff nearby who can help.

The third and final danger is that of data loss. You may be thinking that emails are saved “on the cloud”. They are, but sometimes you may look at an email and then delete it thinking it is not important. Then a few weeks later, you realized that email was important, so you go back and find it. Alas, it was sent into the trashcan and deleted permanently. Some local IT companies can launch an email backup to ensure that emails like that are recoverable with time stamps. Just call the IT company and they can try and recover it. 

Overall, having a domain attached email is beneficial for longevity, security, and protection. All these things are easy to handle and manage when you have a local company with experience behind them. It may be painful to setup, but in the long run, if you ever get locked out of your non-domain attached email with no way to get back in and support for them is lackluster, you can have a local IT team help you reset your password so you can login to your email. That way, you can get back to doing what you love to do.