Regrettably, an alarming number of irresponsible people, particularly small businesses use webmail ( we mean AOL BT Tiscali Hotmail & Gmail etc on line services) webmail is fine for a bit of casual email from a remote location but as the main application in which to read, store and process email when a running business or handling sensitive information? one word - DONT!

There are many of good reasons not to but no one listens until its too late please just do not use webmail!

Unfortunately, with some services the session cookie is left available on the server, this information may be collected by a random search. The hacker just needs to reverse engineer the hash which is stored with the user account & they have access to your webmail account - easy. So please stop using webmail. Webmail is a fallback solution, your PC just fell over, OK, so yours never crashes? and you need to get an email away or read one, you fire up another PC & away you go.

The other big problem with most webmail is that all your mail, sent, received & address books is kept on line, no ones going to thank you if the server goes down and the admins have to hose your data to get it running & your mail gets dumped without a thought. Furthermore, you are totally dependent on your POP3 login and password for security, consider the implications please. Say your bank did this, youd be horrified, so why should you do it with your clients data sent in the form of email?

And what if, some clever clogs (and there are lots of them) uses a password sniffer whilst connected to a wireless network with no separation? Its not that difficult, youre at an airport lounge & someone observes you type in your password? I could go on...

Strongwebmail who provide "The most secure webmail accounts on the planet" was hacked after challenging security analysts to break in & discover their chief execs schedule for 26th June - & they succeeded!

We all know that Internet Explorer is full of holes and needs patching frequently so the prospect of someone abusing it in a manner that would enable a hacker to compromise your mail store is a reality that needs to be understood loud and clear and acted on. Im not saying that mail servers are not secure. Its the manner in which some servers handle session cookies or the potential for the data stream between PC & server could be intercepted as its not via a VPN IPSEC tunnel or a https socket that you connect, it needs to be considered as fairly open, ie 'man in the middle' attack is possible

Clearly there is no single solution that fits every permutation and Im not talking to admins that run their own mailservers on larger networks, our advice is to:

Dont keep email on line, use a POP3 mailbox with a good password & download your mail onto a reliable mail client, theres plenty of online guides including ours - Thunderbird works very well. We dont use or recommend Microsoft mail clients, security is good enough in our opinion.

Once youve got your POP3 mail configured, you can manage the mail correctly and also consider backing up the mail store.

In addition to this you may want to consider a portable mail client like our U3 solution and opt to 'leave a copy on the server' until you log in with your main PC & download your mail, theres a brilliant fall back solution in the form of a pen drive for a few pounds that could save you imense amounts of pain & grief, our U3 solution works for us & customers who use it love it so why shouldnt it work for you!

And for the truly paranoid that must have an online mailstore why not, in addition to downloading you mail, forward a copy from your mailbox to somewhere independant like Strongwebmail . Both are independent of any ISP you may never have to use it but if your local mailstore is lost, you have an independent backup of your received mail, or thats the desired intent.!