I recently sent an email to someone I had corresponded with previously. When I got a bounce-back, I thought I had the wrong address or made a typo. I doubted myself as that is my nature but seeing the email address is in my ‘history’, part of me knew I had the correct domain name spellings ...
It was fortunate that on this occasion, I had a bounce-back message from Microsoft that the system could not deliver the email. I have had many occasions where non-delivery reports have been slow and it can take up to 725 hours for Microsoft (or any email provider), to report back an undelivered email.
How many times have you thought that the other person, who is also receiving thousands of emails a week, is ignoring you? Emails can easily go into the spam or junk folders or, in my case, we use a dedicated email filtering system (which we monitor every day) and will quarantine suspect electronic correspondence.
In short, unlike an old-fashioned fax machine which only required a working phone line, emails are not guaranteed to be sent or received as there are many factors that will affect the transmission.
We forget that we are still able to talk to people and my personal view is, is that if there are urgent matters at hand, then a phone call or face-to-face (physical or virtual) meeting is the best way of ensuring a message gets heard.
I have seen emails with very sensitive information sent in the body of the text, instead of being on a password-protected attachment. Emails can be intercepted and we must take more care and be less reliant on this type of communication format.
Do you test your systems and undertake cyber security/phishing email training with your organisation regularly? I recommend at least once a quarter.
If you feel inspired to find out more then do call me on 07555 807700 or leave a comment below and I'll be in touch as soon as I can.