Manthan

More than once, I have received email which is intended for a different recipient and is secure in nature. Once was when I received an email from the HR containing details of salary of one of the co-employee, but was meant for some other person. Another instance was regarding budgeting and the dollar figures were being discussed, I happened to be accidentally copied on those email. The email providers should seriously look at protecting this kind of data using some email sending rules, perhaps creating secure groups of contacts.

What I propose is each email that is being exchanged between say two Vice Presidents of a company should be under the category “VP’s and above” and in case its accidentally being copied to some one not a member of that group, it should prompt a popup saying do you really want to copy this particular person.

So each mail that is going to be a discussion about budgeting should be categorized as one and automatically the email rules make sure that the mail cannot be forwarded or accidentally copied to members who are not part of this privilege group. The privilege group can be derived from he LDAP or from the active directory services. Naturally contractors or other employees are not going to be part of any of this privilege group. In addition any email address other than the corporate emails will not accidentally receive such emails.

Going one step further, perhaps the client software should be able to decided when to warn the users before sending about the people in CC or BCC based on the contents of the mail. Attachments should reside on central server and users should not receive a copy of the document, just a reference. Access to this document is by the reference present in the email. The sender of the email should have a chance to modify the access to the document , add or remove members in case they are no longer privilege to access that data.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.