How to protect mailbox and e-mail

The risk of being hit by a virus via Email always depends on one’s ability to recognize them and not be deceived by scams. The Email box is very important today because it is our most used digital identityis used to access social networks and to receive important work, business or school communications.

If the Email box is compromised, stolen or spied on, it could run into serious security and privacy issues. In most cases, the cause of infiltrations in the Email box is the owner’s inattention or his ingenuity which leads him to fall into traps or activate viruses.

In the following guide we will show you the best tricks to effectively protect your mailbox so as to avoid phishing, spam, scam emails and messages with viruses. It is advisable to always apply these tricks, whether you use email for work or a personal mailbox.

READ ALSO -> Best anti-spam services to protect business email and web

1) Use separate email accounts

This is advice that, as I have seen, is rightly followed by many people. The e-mail account is probably the centralized hub of one’s personal activity online and also offline (in reality).

If all Facebook notifications, registrations to websites for newsletters, private messages etc. are sent by e-mailmeans putting all your eggs in one basket. If that basket is stolen, all eggs in it will be lost.

The ideal is to have a mailing address to use only for important things such as business communications or communications concerning financial transactions while, for everything else, use a separate one. Having separate e-mail accounts strengthens security and is also more productive since it becomes easier to distinguish important e-mails (which are in a specific inbox) from all the rest and to be able to use the secondary e-mail box in peace.

In another article we have seen the best sites to create a new email account.

2) Create a different and difficult password

If on point 1 I found a certain convergence, as far as passwords are concerned people tend to rely on a series of defined passwords or worse on use one password for many accounts.

If you have many accounts on different sites you can’t take the risk of using the exact same password for everyone otherwise, if this were discovered by a hacker through a compromised site, he could access all personal accounts that use the same password.

A good solution to always have different passwords is to rely on the Chrome random password generator (which can save them in its synchronized cloud space) or use an external and synchronized password manager such as Bitwarden.

To learn more we can read our guides on how to create strong passwords come on how to store passwords and website logins safely and securely.

If instead we want to find out if a password is compromised we can read the article on how Check if your email and password accounts have been stolen.

3) Avoid phishing emails

Phishing are deceptive emails that seem serious and come from institutions such as the post office or your bank, complete with an original logo, official colors and cryptic but plausible messages.

Recognizing a phishing email can be difficult but Avoid clicking on emails to avoid most problems that warn of blocked accounts, imminent transfers made, money to be released, Amazon packages never requested or discount coupons to be redeemed.

However, this cannot be an absolute rule: many emails we receive when registering for a service require you to click a confirmation link, without forgetting the links to blog and forum newsletters.

4) We do not open unsolicited attachments

If he was expecting something from a friend, that’s fine but if someone sends files by surprisewithout first warning or without precise indications, it is better to trash the message immediately.

Once there were many Emails that were sent to thousands of people with PowerPoint presentations or with funny images that were shared in chains. Today, fortunately, this practice is in disuse (on the other hand, however, Facebook has become more dangerous).

As explained in another article, it is very important to learn how to recognize emails with viruses.

5) Use a VPN on public and free Wi-Fi

When we check e-mail from the computer on a free Wi-Fi network (for example in a hotel, restaurant, shopping center or public park) someone could spy on our connection, steal packets in transit from our PC and steal our passwords in a simple way.

In fact, there are programs called network sniffer which can be used by hackers to intercept data traffic.

To avoid this danger can be very useful only connect to the public network with an active VPN: in this way our incoming and outgoing traffic will be encrypted and no hacker will be able to recover personal information, accounts and passwords for accessing emails or services.

We can read our guides on the best VPN services to use best free secure vpn and at best premium VPNs.

6) Turn on two-factor authentication and use aliases

The two most useful functions for protecting your mailbox and e-mail are thetwo-factor authentication and the use of .

With two-factor authentication we will have to enter a second authentication code in addition to the username and password: this code can be obtained via SMS (fastest method) or with anauthentication apps (which generates timer codes or OTP codes).

With email aliases we can get some fictitious email addresses that can be associated with our email address: every time we provide an alias we are actually hiding our real e-mail address and, in case of problems, simply delete the aliases to avoid ending up with useless newsletters, spam messages and unwanted messages.

Conclusions

Protecting your mailbox is all in all very simple: just follow the instructions provided to the letter to get a safe, efficient mailbox with very little spam (which is however very difficult to achieve, especially if we have subscribed to many services over the last few years).

If your mailbox is compromised or lost, follow the guide to recover the login and password of the Email account.

If you think you have everything in order, we can too check if we are protected with the security checklist.