How to Secure your emails

Your Emails are whether personal or business are very important and any hack or theft to your email account can lot of damage both financially and socially. Just like your Cell phone number or home phone number, your emails are your online identity and if left unguarded can be disastrous. This articles explains how by taking few precautions and necessary steps, you can reduce the chance of email theft to minimal.

Always use a strong password: Don’t use very common password name such as your pet name, sibling name or even your date of birth. As per one of the surveys, people use very generic password to access their emails such as password, 123456, abc123, qwerty, monkey, letmein etc. These are pretty simple to crack as the hackers would just add the list to their database and can try to break in to have your email access. Try using a combinations of numerical and letters with some letters in Capital form. Do not ever use simple passwords.
Use security options: Try using security options in case you forget your password. Many companies offer security questions and images to foolproof your password. Even if you do not like the security question offered by them, try using a very sensible security question on your own. Sign up for alerts via sms when your password is changed. Also important is using a reliable Secondary email in case you loose your password.
Always logout: Most people after accessing their emails don’t logout and just close the browser window. Anyone who opens the browser window again could access your email. Try using Private browsing available on all browsers which don’t store emails and passwords. If you close the windows without logging out, other user won;t be able to access your account as the page nothing is saved and the page would prompt to enter username and password again.
Don’t open suspicious or unknown emails: Never open emails which looks suspicious and has attachments. Only open email attachments that come from a trusted source and that are expected. If if you have to open an attachment, scan it first with a good antivirus system. Also Avoid Delivery Failure message that you do not send.
Forward your emails to another account: Just for security and making sure you have the back up of your existing emails, forward the emails to other secondary email address. This makes sure that even if you loose your password or gets hacked, you always have the inbox emails available.
Avoid using Webmail: Try using a secure email client such as Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail. Use either POP or IMAP connections to secure your email and back up locally via a PST file. Avoid using web mails on non secure WiFi connections or public places such as Internet Cafe or library.