What happens if your email stops working?

It’s unlikely of course, but it can happen.

Like any other kind of complicated technology, internet connections and email servers can, as we know, have problems from time to time. And if either of them do go down, you won’t be able to send or receive emails until they’ve been fixed.

So if running your business absolutely depends on email it’s worth thinking about how you can protect your business from events that could lead to loss of business or angry customers.

This is where ‘email continuity’ services can help. The way they work is very simple:

1. Every time someone in your company sends or receives an email, a copy of it is stored in a secure server
2. Up to three months of emails are stored, as well as your address books and calendars
3. If your email server or the internet goes down the service kicks in automatically, or you can choose to set it off manually.
4. You can now access your email through a web-browser from home or somewhere else with an internet connection, or by using Microsoft Outlook, or on your smartphone
5. When your email systems comes back on again, the service automatically re-synchronises all your emails.

Of course a service like this costs money. How much depends on the number of email addresses you have. For a business with ten people you’d be looking at something like £50 to £60 per month. And remember, this service scans all your emails for viruses and spam as well.

So what do you think? Have you ever had a problem with email where this kind of system might have helped?