Email Security Best Practice for customer service team?

[eastbr]

We have about 20 people in our customer service department.
It is important to respond as quickly as possible to our clients email correspondence.

When a team member is sick or on vacation they have been in the habit of just giving their network login out to others on the team.
This goes against any kind of "security best practice".

How do you handle this situation to provide good customer service without the gaping security hole?

 

[sawedoff]

My suggestion is to either set the team members up so they can get each other's email, ot to make a policy that they have to forward their email when they are gone (or some comination of the two. Like "if you know you will be out, forward your email, otherwise, one of us can go into your inbox from our own PC and manage your mail."

Sawedoff

 

[pgaliardo]

Ditto to what Sawedoff suggested as far as forwarding e-mails. You can do this via rules or from the server side. If they are using Outlook, maybe you should set up a policy to use Out of Office assistant and have the message explain that they are on vaction and if you need immediate assistance please e-mail whoever.
Last thing you want to do is have people trading passwords with each other.

 

[eastbr]

Thank you both for your responses.

We have been utilizing a combination of your suggestions.

When an employee knows they are going to be out they are supposed to set their Out of Office assistant.
When an employee is going to be out for an extended period of time we usually add their mailbox to the view of a supporting team member in Outlook.

The issue I get is more along the lines of "We are expecting an important email from such and such client. Please give me the login or log me in to employees PC, we need this as soon as possible".

I could setup the individuals email to be forwarded to a supporting team member when they are out or require that the individuals set it up themselves. The problem is not all emails are business related, which has the potential to open a whole nother can of worms.

Maybe the answer is to tell endusers that their email is corporate intellectual property and they shouldn't be sending or receiving anything they wouldn't want their manager to see. Save personal stuff for yahoo and gmail

 

[franklin97355]

Why not set up a seperate mail address for the support team like support@yourcompany.com and give it out for support issues?

The answer is "42"

 

[pgaliardo]

Franklin97355 has a good point. Perhaps you can set up a distribution group with a generic e-mail address and add the appropriate members in the distribution group.
Also, if you are using AD/Exchange you can grant users the right to log onto other user's mailboxes without having to log in as the user.
As far as personal e-mail - you will have to set up your own policy.
At my last job, we had a hosted Exchange with a "Master" mailbox that all e-mails went through - so every user's e-mail was in this master mailbox as well as their own. The owner had the rights to the master mailbox and made it known to everyone that she did. It was checked every day for sales related stuff. With that in mind, users were pretty selective on how they used e-mail. That may be a bit drastic, but just giving you an idea of other people's policies.

 

[sawedoff]

As far as personal mail, out policy is "don't do anything with email that you don't want published in the local newspaper". That doesn't prevent all of it, but it makes you think. The administrator can see into any mailbox, whether you have a master box or not.

You could designate certain people as backups for others, and put the mailboxes into both of their outlook accounts, one would be yours, and one will be visible, and you can reply "on behalf of..."

Sawedoff

 

[58sniper]

If you're using Exchange, a Public Folder where all inbound messages go to will save a lot of headaches. Support staff can then respond to them as needed.

Out of Office assistant increases spam and decreases security. And, in Exchange, it's turned off to the Internet by default.

Pat Richard, MCSE MCSA:Messaging CNA
Want to know how email works? Read for yourself -

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt