Old habits die hard. We’ve all done it; you find something that you know you’ll need for work, so you open your personal email and send it to your work email. Easy enough, right? Nope, not anymore.
Enter Spammers
They email you, pretending to be your boss, asking you to do such things as send them $5000 in Home Depot gift cards immediately, and now we have a problem.
Reminder: You can put whatever name you want on your email address. I could create an email right now and put Oprah Winfrey as the name and when you glance at your inbox, you’ll think, at least for a second, that you just made a fun new friend.
The Solution
Email security systems now monitor for people using fake names in email, referred to as “Impersonation Protection” by Microsoft. It’s an important feature that prevents people from emailing you and pretending to be your colleague. So, if someone from outside your company emails you with the exact same name as you, it’ll probably get flagged as spam. If there is a legitimate business reason for this, there are ways IT can make exceptions to the system.
So, we face the usual security trade-off. Do we want to stop spammers? Yes, very much. Do we want you to be able to email yourself? Less so. It’s convenient, but is it really necessary? We also need to think about data governance. What files and content are stored in those email you’re sending yourself? Your company has no control over that personal email account, so if it gets compromised, which happens all the time, that could be a serious problem. So, the official answer is that it would be a bad practice even without these new Impersonation Protection controls.
Summary
Emailing yourself from non-work email addresses needs to be retired as a practice.
A Better Option
Install Microsoft’s apps such as One Drive and Outlook on your phone and ensure your IT department has configured App Protection Policies. Not sure how? We do this every day, reach out and we’ll let you know how we can help.