Email is both a blessing and a real annoyance to businesses. It allows you to send a quick message to your clients or to your employees in a branch office hundreds of miles away. But it can also leave you vulnerable to viruses that can cause your server to crash, spam that can eat away at huge parts of your day, and can put confidential company information out into public cyberspace. What should you be doing to protect your business?

1. Mistake #1 - You do not have any policies in place for the use of your email system. If you do not want your employees using company time and company resources to send pornography, bad jokes, or company secrets, your business needs a written policy that all employees must follow. It must start with who can use the email system and for what purposes. You should consult your attorney (and you should have a business attorney as part of your team) who can advise you about privacy and compliance issues. The written policy must be distributed to all employees as part of the employee handbook or on its own if you do not have such a handbook or manual. Its content should be part of the training that all employees undergo when they start their employment with your company. And your policies should be reviewed once a year to ensure that they are current with the law.

2. Mistake #2 - You do not have any security systems in place for your company's emails. All of us have experienced. Spam wastes hours of your employees' time, even if they are smart enough to just delete them. They waste even more time if your employees are opening up and reading them. You need security systems that will filter out and watch your email so that viruses and spam will find it harder to get through. There are companies that you can hire, or computer hardware and computer software that you can buy. Which form of protection you choose will be a balancing of the size of your company, the size of your tech department (if there even is one) and the amount of money you want to spend.

3. Mistake #3 - Your employees use the company email system for private purposes. If your employees are using company's email system, it is assumed by the recipient of the email that the employee is representing the company concerning the contents of the email. But what if your employee is using the company email system for his/her own private concerns and there is a legal problem between your employee and the recipient of that email? Your company will be part of any lawsuit that ensues because the recipient of that email has rightly or wrongly believed that your employee was acting as a representative of your company. Even if you are able to get your company dismissed from this lawsuit, you have now spent time and money on lawyers to clear your name. And all because you had no policy against your employees using the company email system for private purposes.

4. Mistake #4 - You monitor your employees' emails without their knowledge. You are curious about whether an employee is looking to leave the company and take company secrets or customer lists with him/her. So you start opening up his/her emails to read them without his/her knowledge. You may have a legal problem, called invasion of privacy, if you have not created and informed your employees about a policy that permits you to read any and all emails that are sent or received on the company's email system.

5. Mistake #5 - You have no company policy on storage of emails. Most companies delete emails after they have been on the computer server for a period of time. But emails are increasingly being used as evidence in lawsuits. Additionally, certain industries must keep emails, such as the financial and healthcare industries. Your company should have procedures and policies in place as to which types of emails must be retained and archived and which can be deleted.

As a former general counsel of a national mortgage lender, Ms. Gronsky is experienced in corporate matters, mortgage licensing on a nationwide basis, and all facets of real estate transactions.