Email to Competitors and Free Services

Identify and Reduce Risky Messages

Messages sent to competitors and those sent to free email services, such as Hotmail and Gmail, may contain confidential information that poses a security risk.  However, simply blocking all communications to these sites might prevent legitimate communications from getting through.  For example, it would be rare that somebody at your organization should send an email to a recipient at a competitor.  But, prior to a conference, communications between members of a standards group would make sense.

It is important to flag messages to competitors and free accounts as part of an overall security program.  Once the messages are identified, different actions may be taken based on the sender or the sender's role.  Or, actions may be taken based on the content of a message or an attachment.  Messages may be blocked, quarantined or a simple warning may be sent.

The following best practices can help reduce the problem:

• Messages to competitors — List the email domains of competitors and those who may be working directly for competitors, such as advertising agencies. 
• Messages to free email services — Identify messages sent to free email services, such as Hotmail, Yahoo! mail, and Gmail.
• Report potential abuse — Create a report that will identify the largest senders to these domains and also the largest messages sent to these domains.
• Investigate these messages further — Create "Smart Rules" to restrict access to competitors and free email services.  For example, messages above a certain size limit or containing certain types of attachments may be restricted.  Key word filters may augment the investigation certain confidential information, such as unannounced product names.
   

Permessa Email Control! and Permessa IM Control! automatically makes best practice recommendations based on email use and can automatically monitor communications at the source to take appropriate action with a low false-positive rate.