E-mail has become a part of everyday existence not only to replace letters we used to send in the post but to send pictures and exchange other information with friends and family. We also often receive and send sensitive information through e-mail such as personal financial information that can include social security numbers and other data that could cause us considerable damage if it got into the hands of the wrong person.
E-mail inbox security is something we should all take seriously. Following are some techniques that you can use to ensure that your e-mails remain confidential and that bad actors can’t gain access to them.
First and foremost choose a strong password for your e-mail account. Never use an easily guessed word or phrase and avoid using your birthdate or the names of loved ones or other easily guessed details. Your password should consist of a combination of upper and lowercase letters as well as punctuation symbols and numbers. If available, enable a security question as a secondary security feature for access. Once more, do not use a question whose answer can be easily guessed (birthdates, pet names, hometown and so on). Create the toughest question you can or use an obscure answer that cannot easily be guessed.
Make sure that your e-mail client is using Secure Socket Layers (SSL) encryption or one that uses any variety of PGP encryption. You can also look at encrypting your email messages so that only you and the desired recipient(s) can read them.
SSL is the internet standard for creating encrypted links between a web server and your browser; it prevents the text of your e-mail being intercepted on the network while it is being transmitted. You can tell when SSL is used because websites will start with the “https://” prefix rather than just “http://” and a lock symbol will be displayed before the website domain name.
If you can’t use a E-mail inbox security for whatever reason and you still want to make sure your emails are safe, you can encrypt the e-mail messages themselves. This makes them unreadable to anyone but you and the recipient, even if they intercepted from the mail server. Two of the most common forms of encryption are Open PGP and Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME). Both require you to create security certificates on your computer (consisting of a private and public key) and then exchange the public keys with the desired recipient; only people holding the correct public/private key combinations can decrypt the messages.
