Sending emails has become a big part of everyday routine. Many people rely on email to run their business. Most people however are not aware of some of the drawbacks, limitations and security problems that everyday email can pose.

I’ll first go into the 2 main security threats that come into your inbox, probably a lot more often than you realize. The number one threat is the spread of viruses through email attachments. Opening an attachment that came on an email is risky business. Even if you know the person that it came from. If you get an email attachment and you have no idea who the person is that sent it to you, than chances are that it is a virus of some sort. However in the case that you do know the person, it may have been a virus on that person’s computer that saw your email address in that person’s contact list. Viruses have been written to send an email with an attachment containing a copy of itself to everyone in the infected computers contact list. The person that owns the computer generally has no idea that they are ever infected with a virus, and for that reason has no idea that their computer is sending emails to everyone they know. If you receive an email with an attachment that you are not expecting from a particular person, call them and verify that they did indeed send you the email.

The second security threat has to do with identity theft. Identity thieves use a method called “PHISHING” to trick you into voluntarily giving up all of your personal info, or giving up account info for any number of accounts you may have with other companies. (IE. Credit card companies, insurance, loans, banks, etc.) What they do is send you an email that mocks the real company’s look, Inside of that email is usually a link to a fake website that is designed to look and feel like the real one. On this page they will ask you to verify the account information for that company. They will ask you to type in your account number, phone number, address, birth date, password, social security, ETC. With this info they can then go on to access you bank accounts, credit card accounts, or any account you have given them access to.

One major drawback of using email comes in when you try to forward an email to many people all at once. Lets say that your co-worker sent you an email the contained a funny joke. You then wanted to forward that email to everyone you know. The problem here is that the outgoing mail server of you email provider may see this as an attempt to send out spam. Your email provider can, at its discretion, block any email traffic that it may think is spam. They may even send you an email warning you about it.

A certain limitation of email, affects many people, but is relatively unknown. If you are trying to send an email with an attachment, just about all email providers limit the size of the email attachment that they allow you to send. For most providers this is at or around 5 megabytes. For example if you were trying to send a video clip to a friend, and the file was 7 megabytes, the outgoing email server would not let it through. You would receive some sort of an error message, or the email would just appear to sit in your outbox and do nothing. Some email server have the limit set to 10 megabytes and some even allow larger attachments when sending to an address within the same service.(For example sending from a Gmail account to a Gmail account.)