Do you use webmail? I know I have done in the past, just on the odd occasion when I have been at somebody’s house and I have needed to check my mail on my laptop (We are talking pre smartphone days here, today I would just check my phone). Webmail can be handy when you are in a bit of a fix. There are a lot of people who use webmail as the only means of accessing their emails and I worry for them. Here are some reasons why:

• Security – If you use a shared machine to access your email then you must ensure that you log out completely otherwise somebody else might be able to get access to all your personal emails. If you are lucky they will just read them. If you are unlucky they might start sending messages to people that you know.
• Security 2 – Again this is most applicable to using public machines. Ever considered that the machine that you are using might have had some form of scraping software installed? The software makes a note of every keystroke you make and thus gives the bad guys your login details so that they can check you out in detail later.
• Backup – What would you do if the server that your email is stored on stopped functioning? All your emails are on that server and you have no way of gaining access to it, how important would those emails be to you? If you think it could not happen because machines are so reliable these days, think again. The machine may not crash, it could be damaged in a fire or flood. Worse still your hosting company could go out of business resulting in the server unexpectedly being switched off, all your mails will go with it and you will have very little recourse.

What would I suggest? I advise all my clients to use a proper email program on whatever machine they use. This means they have a copy of their emails on their local machine that they can access at anytime. If you do not already download emails to your own machine here are a number of free email programs reviewed.

I also recommend that when they download their emails they leave a copy on the server. This means that if something happens to their own machine there is still a copy on the server that can be downloaded. For real belt and braces protection I also use cloud storage to back up my emails, and other valuable data.

I end up with three copies of an email, one on my local machine, one on the server and one in the cloud. It might seem like overkill, but ask yourself the question, what would you do if you lost all your emails?