Developing a Webmail Policy

Does your organization have a policy on who can use external webmail and what can be sent out using external webmail? In today's web world, it's all too easy to get to a web-based email platform and download a malicious virus or to send sensitive corporate data out of a secure private network. With web-based email even more prevalent than client based email today, it's important to set parameters around its use in the corporate environment.

Today's proxies let you create policy around web-based email. It can be an extremely secure policy blocking access to all web-based email, or you can be selective, allowing access to web-based email pages, but prevent downloads of attachment files to prevent any possible download of viruses. Alternatively you can set policy to use an anti-virus scanner to scan any downloads that are permitted by policy.

For outbound DLP (data leakage protection), a proxy can help prevent DLP by sending any outbound documents being sent over web-based email to a DLP scanner via ICAP. We've discussed ICAP as a protocol available to proxies in a previous article in this blog.

With all these options available on many proxies, there's no reason not to have a policy on access to web-based email.