How to secure your email inbox with 5 easy steps

How to secure your email inbox with 5 easy steps

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Whether is business or your private life, you have to admit we rely a lot on email to convey important data. If your email was to be hacked today, the hacker would hold a significant part of your life’s data. Your financial, medical and personal data would be at great risk.

A hacker can easily impersonate you and scam your family and friends, as well as wipe clean your bank accounts. For a business account, the hacker can easily hold you at ransom with client information. Leaked client data can cost you millions in paying for damages if clients sue you, or even ruin your business completely. These are very scary and sobering thoughts, as they should be, and should be enough to jolt you into securing your email and improving on its security. Here are some tips on how to secure your email:

Use TLS (Transport Layer Security)

Emails are usually sent in plain text from one email server to another. This makes the email vulnerable to interception while in transit. To solve this problem, TLS (Transport Layer Security) comes in handy. This technology offers encryption for your message while it is being delivered from your server to another.

Securing your emails better means that anybody eavesdropping on your email while it is in transit cannot decrypt it. To maximize privacy and security, TLS is a requirement in all servers that handle the email. Key features include authentication by the use of digital certificates and message encryption using Public Key Infrastructure that encrypts messages.

Strong passwords

The simplest way to ensure no one has access to your email, change your password to a stronger one. A strong password has to be very unique and should not be in use anywhere else. The ideal password is a long one that cannot be guessed by any hacker. A two- factor authentication process is essential for shielding your privacy. This entails the generation of a second password that is used only once, and sent to a duly registered phone, making it very hard for anyone to get to your email messages.

Be wary of tracking links and images

Most company websites track the links embedded in their emails. They do this to check and track how many people read their emails and who clicked on their links. Hovering over a link, you can tell where the link will lead you. If need be, copy the link on a Tor Browser to hide your location and check the link out.

Companies also use images in emails to track you. Once you open the email, the image is automatically loaded from remote servers. These images usually have tracking codes which the administrators use to track who loaded the images. Links and images can track you, and also redirect you to malicious sites.

Don’t download attachments

Attachments are potential carriers of malware. If you receive email attachments from sources you are not sure about, do not download these attachments.  Download attachments from sources you are sure about. Formats such as pdf, doc and xls are often vulnerable to malware infections. Your mail provider has a built-in function that scans for potential viruses.

End to end encryption

End to end email encryption entails data transmission where only the email sender and receiver can view the email. The sender’s mail system encrypts the message and nobody else can decrypt the email without a decryption key. End to end encryption provides the much-needed confidentiality in sending sensitive information. You give the email recipient a special key for decrypting the emails you send them.

Conclusion

Email security is vital, whether it is personal or business email. Hackers relish hacking into email systems for the amount of information they can get off them. Most people send very sensitive information via email, including bank details and personal information. This information can be used against you unless you take steps to secure your email. Securing your email system means nobody can intercept your emails while in transit.