FAQs: Advice for recipients of Egress emails

Egress allows Cafcass staff to securely send confidential information to external email accounts (including Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail). The nature of the work we carry out with children and families means that we often deal with information that is sensitive, which we wouldn’t want to fall into the wrong hands. Measures such as secure postal services have been in place for some time now. However we are increasingly sending information by email, as this is quicker and more convenient for the families and other agencies we work with. We’ve therefore introduced an easy to use piece of software that will help ensure that any information sent by email is secure.

Yes. All recipients can view and securely reply to emails sent via Egress from Cafcass for free. They will only be charged if they use Egress themselves to send to recipients other than Cafcass, following use of 20 free credits.

On their first use only, recipients will be required to create an Egress account before they can sign in to view the email they’ve received. This is a short and simple process. Creating an account requires input of an email address and the creation of a password. Once this is done, an activation code will be sent to that email address. Recipients will then be able to sign in. This will allow Egress encrypted emails to be viewed.

In general, emails can only be viewed by the original recipient. However, ‘access settings’ can be amended to allow others read access. This is useful in the case of group mailboxes, or where a solicitor needs to grant read access to colleagues or assistants. Alternatively, the person you have forwarded the email to can choose the option ‘request access’ which be sent to the sender of the email to approve.

Yes. However we would encourage partner agencies to cease using the CJSM accounts in favour of Egress because of the various issues experienced with the CJSM accounts (small mailbox sizes, licensing costs).

Yes. Egress has a mobile website to enable easy use on a mobile device. There is also an Egress app available for BlackBerry devices, iPhones/iPads, and Android devices.

Egress does not handle or store any information that users share. The information is encrypted using AES 256-bit encryption and written to a secure package which can be transferred to the recipient using CD/DVD, USB stick, local file, FTP, HTTP, or an attachment to email. The information Egress keeps relates to user management, package management and audit information only. Egress considers this information to be sensitive too, so they have designed their policy engine to use secure transactions, strong authentication, and a secure encrypted server database.

Egress have gone to great lengths to ensure they cannot see your information. The Egress Client software encrypts and decrypts your information on your local machine therefore Egress does not have access to it.

They should contact the Egress support team directly using the following methods:

• Email [email protected]
• Telephone +44(0)20 3973 1333
• Live chat www.egress.com/support/contact-support

Further advice and guidance in using Egress.

For further enquiries about Egress and its use in Cafcass, please email: [email protected]