Jalaj P. Jha Technical & Miscellaneous Ramblings

Secure Your Official Email ID

If you are working for a company that has provided you with an email id on Companies domain, I am sure it carried an instruction that prohibits you from using the email id for personal work. One of the reasons for this restrictions is to avoid the business IDs to get into spammer’s hands which will consume heavy resources though at the end the mail may end up filtering in spam filter. Can you believe it? More than 97% of all emails sent over the net are unwanted or spam (source http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7988579.stm). Keeping this in view Businesses discourage their employees to use official id for personnel communications.

Some of you might want to use official id to get mails as many offices block webmail sites and in such a case they would have to get back home before they get to read it. Well in that case read ahead.

Create a new Gmail ID. Yes a Gmail ID. Though some other webmail providers too may provide features we are going to talk about (many we are sure don’t), we will stick to Gmail. Now after logging in to the account click on the “settings” link on top-right. This will open Settings page where you now need to click on “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab.

As you can see there is a section called “Forwarding” where “Disable forwarding is the default selection. Select “Forward a copy of in…” and provide your official email ID in space meant for “email address”. Keep the dropdown list selection “keep Gmail’s copy in the inbox” as it is. “Click on “Save Changes” at the bottom and you are done.

Now if you are expecting an important mail from someone, ask him to send that on this new Gmail address. As soon as the Gmail account get the mail it will forward a copy of maii to your office ID and you will be able to read it immediately.

You can also go for selectively forwarding mails from selected people who send you mails to your current Gmail ID, yes current Gmail address please note. All you need to create a filter by clicking on “Create a filter” link to the right to Gmail search box on the top.

Fill in the email  of address of person whose mails you need to be delivered to you office address. Click on “Next Step”

Enter your official ID in the space for “email address” and check checkbox before “Forward it to:” Click on “Create Filter” button. This way you can get mails from selected senders.

Now the steps as above ensures that your office ID will always remain unknown to the senders thereby reducing chances of spammers getting hold of your ID. BEWARE though, don’t reply to mails sent this way to office, as your reply mail would contain office ID instead of Gmail id which routed the mail. And if the other person replies to that mail of yours, your office mail may get automatically added to the contact list (gmail has such a feature, others may have too)

You may see no harm in getting your office ID into the contact list of other person, but unfortunately many people expose their own Gmail/MSN/Yahoo email ID and password to social networking sites in a bid to get all acquaintances added to their friends lists. The social network on getting the ID/password uses the APIs to get all email addresses from the contact list which they use to send invites to. So don’t be surprised when you get one such invite, this is just the Beginning of the End and your official ID can anytime go to the spammers.

To end with, keep your official ID secure. Even if you need to get personal mails on this ID, do employ a Gmail account to act as a preventive layer. If this Gmail ID ever gets into hands of spammers you only need to remove the forwarding and filter and spam goes off your office ID. Use this Gmail ID for one way communication only i.e receiving and do not reply to mails received this way.