Separation of Business and Personal Email

Why You Should Have Separate Email Addresses

Your personal email should be private. UTHSC owns all its email addresses and has the right to read them if necessary. UTHSC’s emails are subject to eDiscovery searches and disclosures.

Think of your personal correspondence. Communications with family members or friends, your bank, your doctor’s office, notifications for all these accounts you signed up for, i.e. Facebook, Amazon, credit cards, etc. should not be any business of UTHSC.

If you use the same username and email account for everything you access, the risks are higher for an incident. An attacker can reuse that same information against other accounts to gain access to a wide range of your life. If you use different email addresses in different areas, then a breach in one resource cannot necessarily be used against another.

When you leave UTHSC, whether through retirement, a new job opportunity, or no fault of your own, you have limited access to your email.

What Is the Alternative?

Setting up one, or more, new email addresses is easy. There are free accounts (Google, Yahoo, and others), as well as paid accounts through internet service providers (AT&T, Comcast).

Consider setting up different email addresses for different purposes. One can be for personal correspondence with people and organizations with which you want to have communication. Another one can be set up for those “fill in the blank” instances, but you don’t want to be spammed by that organization into eternity. Possibly, even a third email address associated with any type of sensitive account. You need to choose the best security and privacy options for this one.

ITS does not have a specific recommendation for a provider of personal email accounts. Depending on what you are trying to accomplish there are several, some provide anonymity, some provide encryption, some do not scan your mail, etc. 

Here is a great site that compares the leaders in the business. Best Free Private Email Providers to Protect Your Data (clean.email).

Bottom line, separating your business and personal emails makes good sense, both for your protection and the protection of UTHSC.