Interesting to watch the news tonight and see more on the leaked emails saga that is dogging NZ politics at the moment. With this in mind, I was interested to receive an email from Rich McIver from IT Security today, advising me that his company has just published “Hacking Email: 99 Email Security and Productivity Tips “.

The authors ask why is it that…

when it comes to emails, there are no accepted standards? Even though 6 billion emails are sent every day, almost no one agrees about simple things like email etiquette, how to organize a note, or whether emails are considered private or not.

I’ve scanned through the list of tips and they ring true to me. They could be used as the basis of a pretty good email policy within a school or organisation – with sections dealing with

• etiquette
• communication and effectiveness
• mobile email
• productivity, folders and filtering
• email filtering
• tricks, hacks, backup
• system specific email (which is pretty much a hard sell for google mail, but worth noting all the same)
• privacy and security

Several of the tips have hyperlinks for further information, background or definitions. There’s stuff here that will be of interest for even the most experienced email users. Thanks to Rich and h is team for making this available!