Protecting Your Email Account

Leading research cooperation, the Radicati Group, Inc., a technology market research firm based in California, USA, estimates that over 205 billion emails were sent in 2015 worldwide. Imagine the staggering figure. Email is one of the core means of communication of the 21st century, states another report. It is reliable, effective and messages are delivered instantaneously. Another research revealed that over 4.1 billion people have email addresses worldwide as at 2015 and this figure was expected to grow this year. Having a secure email account is a must, Its security is important as we will like to put an adequate security measure in our houses or other places of interest. It is tough to get people to pay attention and be serious about their online identity. An Email account is the first and primary component of your online identity and yet it’s the one that is left unguarded the most. Email accounts might be virtual but once hacked, the consequences and damages are very real.

We will discuss a few tips that can help secure an email account of webmail services.

Don’t use a simple password or what people can easily guess or regular everyday words or words related to the account name or pet names because these can easily be hack or guess. Webmail service provider will tell you this when setting up your password but that has never made people any wiser. Even hackers feel insulted when they come across passwords like “sweetlove123”, “pass@123” and the like. Google is the best when it comes to putting real effort into securing your email account proactively. You can use special characters, numbers, upper and lower case alphabets of almost any length. My Gmail password is between 60 to 80 characters long and my general rule of thumb is to have a password that only the NSA can hack. Setup SMS Alerts Go to your account settings and add your mobile number to receive SMS alerts. Once that’s set up, Google will send you the password reset code whenever somebody tries to reset your password. Alternatively, if you are a smartphone user, you can rely on these SMS alerts and disable password recovery via email altogether. Email accounts are always vulnerable to a hacker from a remote place but your mobile phone is not. Yahoo provides the same feature free too. Livemail has a similar feature

Avoid Webmail

Still not sure about the safety and security of your email account online? It is totally understandable and I suggest you to take it off the Internet. I mean, partially. Get hold of an ISP and get a POP or IMAP account set up for your email address forgoing the webmail set up. Then use desktop email clients like Outlook or Thunderbird to pull your mails. It will make you feel dated, but is reliable and works effectively too.

Did we miss an important tip or got a better suggestion? Share it with the rest of community in the comments section.

Other helpful tips

Password Dos and Don’ts Here are a few tips for creating strong passwords. Take a moment to review these, and consider strengthening some of your passwords if they fall short.

-Create unique passwords that that use a combination of words, numbers, symbols, and both upper- and lower-case letters.

-Do not use your network username as your password.

-Don’t use easily guessed passwords, such as “password” or “user.”

-Do not choose passwords based upon details that may not be as confidential as you’d expect, such as your birth date, your Social Security or phone number, or names of family members.

-Do not use words that can be found in the dictionary. Password-cracking tools freely available online often come with dictionary lists that will try thousands of common names and passwords. If you must use dictionary words, try adding a numeral to them, as well as punctuation at the beginning or end of the word (or both!).

-Avoid using simple adjacent keyboard combinations:

For example, “qwerty” and “asdzxc” and “123456” are horrible passwords and that are trivial to crack.

-Some of the easiest-to-remember passwords aren’t words at all but collections of words that form a phrase or sentence, perhaps the opening sentence to your favourite novel, or the opening line to a good joke. Complexity is nice, but the length is key. It used to be the case that picking an alphanumeric password that was 8-10 characters in length was a pretty good practice. These days, it’s increasingly affordable to build extremely powerful and fast password cracking tools that can try tens of millions of possible password combinations per second. Just remember that each character you add to a password or passphrase makes it an order of magnitude harder to attack via brute-force methods.

-Avoid using the same password at multiple Web sites. It’s generally safe to re-use the same password at sites that do not store sensitive information about you (like a news Web site) provided you don’t use this same password at sites that are sensitive.

-Never use the password you’ve picked for your email account at any online site: If you do, and an e-commerce site you are registered at gets hacked, there’s a good chance someone will be reading your e-mail soon.

-Whatever you do, don’t store your list of passwords on your computer in plain text. My views on the advisability of keeping a written list of your passwords have evolved over time. I tend to agree with noted security experts Bruce Schneier, when he advises users not to worry about writing down passwords. Just make sure you don’t store the information in plain sight.

The most secure method for remembering your passwords is to create a list of every Web site for which you have a password and next to each one write your login name and a clue that has meaning only for you. If you forget your password, most Web sites will email it to you (assuming you can remember which email address you signed up with).