Policy re opening personal e mails in work

mjp

With the increase in phishing attacks in last few months were reviewing procedures in work about how we can reduce the threat of such an attack. We have a small business with 10 employees and one of possible amendments to bring in place would be to restrict staff from accessing personal mailboxes in work. The main issue being is that only 4 of the staff have work e-mail and removes the option for others the 6 to forward any personal mail they might need to access to print out like flight details etc.

Are practices like this common in many other workplaces?

athlone573

I think it's pretty common to block Web access to gmail/Hotmail etc.

I've never heard of people who have work emails being prevented from receiving personal emails with flight tickets etc. Usually they would go through a virus scan and as long as it's only once in a while I wouldn't have a problem with it.

It's totally normal to have a policy of no personal email access. Employees shouldn't need their personal email at work.

For the occasional requirement to access a personal email at work (e.g. print flight details), you can always forward that email to your work address. If someone doesn't have a work email, they can always send the email to another member of staff and ask them to print it for them.

That said, an employer has no responsibility to facilitate people printing out flight details - nice if you do, but by no means something that you should have to worry about.

ineedeuro

You should not be accessing personal emails at work or on a work system. That’s standard practise.

At this stage flights are in your phone so nobody should need to print.

Esse85

Don't most people check email on their phone anyway.

athlone573

ineedeuro wrote: »

You should not be accessing personal emails at work or on a work system. That’s standard practise.

At this stage flights are in your phone so nobody should need to print.

I agree on the first point.

However I always print fight tickets in case phone battery or connectivity falls.

ineedeuro

athlone573 wrote: »

I agree on the first point.

However I always print fight tickets in case phone battery or connectivity falls.

The boarding pass is saved on the phone, no connectivity required

I’m just making the point in this situation teh boss shouldn’t have to risk his/her business because someone wants to print a boarding pass as they have an alternative

If they still want to print then they can go to a print shop etc

km991148

If your security is reliant on restricting people from accessing web mail accounts alone tho you have other problems.
Its still normal-ish for places to restrict, but not as much as it once was and usually not just for problems with viruses (more about company data security).

All machines should probably have locked down anti viurus that updates as well as the mail server (if still on prem) as well as scanning mails in and out.


Restrict if you like but by no mean rely on it alone.

mjp wrote: »

With the increase in phishing attacks in last few months

Also - what do you mean by this - there is probably as many phishing attacks now as there ever has been. Maybe to raise awareness, an employee training course would help as well?