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| Email – Convenience and Cautions Internet email plays an important role in business communications even though other forms of electronic communication are available. Email is a very efficient tool by nature - universal, accessible and speedy in most cases. Ever since the proliferation of the Internet back in 1995 or so, Internet email has become an indispensable part of day to day business operations. It is safe to say that if the Internet email goes down, a lot of inter-company transactions will go down too. While email is a useful business tool, it can also fall victim to malicious hackers. EMSTF is fully aware of these issues, and has laid down the design goals of high availability and virus free operation. Virus scanning Internet mail virus scan gateways are in place to scan both inbound and outbound email. This will greatly reduce the probability of having harmful Internet mails entering our internal network which can cause massive destruction. Furthermore, if by a slim chance an unprotected PC is attached to our internal network and if this PC is infected by virus, it will not be able to send out virus carrying mails to infect other users as all outbound Internet emails are guarded by another internal email virus scanning gateway as well. As email virus scanning is so important, our Internet email virus scanning servers are deployed in pair to minimise possible downtime. Mail hosting Our mail servers are hosted in EMSTF Chai Wan Data Centre (CWDC). This addresses the accessibility requirement of our email system. Redundant connections to the Internet are set up in EMSTF CWDC, which means that our users can access the mail servers at any time anywhere. We also have a redundant mail server which hot syncs data from the main production server periodically, and together with regular offsite data backup, we are confident to restore our email services in the shortest possible time if outage really occurs. Users can retrieve their email via POP3 protocol or a user friendly web interface. As regards data confidentiality of accessing email via Internet, as of today, the web mail interface is https or SSL (Secured Socket Layer) enabled to ensure data privacy. We are also implementing the Secured POP3 protocol interface. Experience Sharing We are more than happy to share our experiences accumulated and infrastructure established. If you are interested in our e-mail management service, please call our Service Development Manager Mr K Lam at 2808 3560. |
