If you hold the contact details for clients or other business associates in your Outlook contacts for example, do be mindful that if you no longer have a business relationship with that contact you may need to hit the delete button.
Many of the contacts will have been added before the GDPR became de rigor last year. Unless you can evidence that you have a qualifying/contractual reason for holding the personal data, then it may need to be deleted.
Contact lists are the crown jewels as far as ne’re do wells are concerned. Hackers who can access your mail server will then have access to these contacts – mail lists for free.
The more criminally minded versions will use threats to extort funds, or misleading emails that seek to obtain bank details.
Which is why reviewing the security of your email accounts is of paramount importance. If you run your own mail server make sure firewalls are in place.
Editing your contacts to rid yourself of entries that are no longer necessary to retain is not a chore for the faint of heart. The process usually demands that you adopt a line by line approach. Stats are hard to come by, but contacts in excess of 1,000 must be commonplace.
With hindsight, perhaps abandoning Filofax and Rolodex systems was premature; although toting them in a bag so they were readily available was a pain.
As so much of our networking is conducted on the web these days the electronic storage of dairies, to-do lists and contact details is an essential part of the process. We do need to ensure that our firewalls are keep up-to-date in order to combat the hackers and we do need to be mindful of our data protection obligations. Time to schedule a review?
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