Protecting the humble email


Planned Departure 200By Komal Joshi of Planned Departure

Facebook’s recent move towards storing passwords and usernames is yet another reminder that we need to value our digital assets by storing and managing them just as carefully (if not more so) as we do our  physical assets.

Which brings us to examine emails more carefully. Up until recently they have been considered anything ranging from cumbersome (when we return from a long break and have to wade through hundreds of them) to filled with junk. Only occasionally do we think of managing them properly.

That is until a client of mine had to pull together a communication trail for a court case she was preparing for. The focus was on what work she had received from a particular supplier who had let her down badly at the last minute. It took her a considerable amount of time and effort to sift through the appropriate emails, however she pointed out that, once constructed, the trail clearly illustrated how her supplier had promised, not delivered, back tracked and then quite simply lied. Her concern had been that emails would not stack up in a court of law, however they were of enormous value to her.

As a consequence, she now finds herself valuing her emails and storing them in a more thorough manner, however she has confessed to letting weeks go by when she does not bother sorting through them, which is why I was delighted to discover there is a new service which handles all of these issues, simply and for free.

Planned Departure, have just launched their new ’email safe’ feature which not only saves wasting time searching through emails, it also ensures access to critical emails even if access to the inbox is denied for whatever reason.  Of course, as Planned Departure are all about safe guarding digital legacies it also has a feature which distributes specific emails to appointed beneficiaries instead of giving access to the entire inbox.

Digital assets go way beyond those elements we have paid for such as books and films, they also go beyond our photos and domain names, they include every move we make and every communication we have and you never know when those will be needed, but one thing is for sure, it makes sense to start managing them all very carefully!

 

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