Know How to Protect Email Accounts and Stay Secure
Email protection for small, medium, and large businesses is an important and unavoidable task. If you are worried about protect email account data then don’t worry this blog post describes various expert recommendations to protect your email accounts from unauthorized access, spam, phishing, and spam. Hence, let’s continue to read this article and learn various tips and tricks about email protection techniques.
What Is Email Protection?
Email protection is a technique to protect email accounts from unauthorized access, spam, phishing, malicious activity, virus attacks, ransomware, etc. Email security refers to protecting against any unauthenticated emails hence it is advisable to deploy the best security features and guide your employees to stay safe from cyber-attacks.
Cyber fraudsters target email accounts because this is the main entry point to enter users’ machines. Emails have crucial details about working professionals and organizations, so they try to put pressure by asking for money. Most of the time cyber criminals send malicious attachments to affect email accounts.
Why to Protect Emails?
Email protection is beneficial to secure email sensitive information, maintain confidentiality, prevent unauthorized access, adhere to privacy regulations, ensure data integrity, uphold organizational reputation, etc.
Email is a traditional way of communication, so most businesses and professionals use it. Hence, cybercriminals target email accounts by sending malicious attachments, phishing emails, spam emails, spoofing, etc. So, email protection for small businesses and large businesses is highly recommended.
According to various data breach investigation reports, cybercriminals try to breach email protection through emails. They usually deliver malware by sending emails and using attractive buttons or banners so that users can click on them.
Emails may have personal private and crucial information like identifications, bank details, cheques, policies, business documents, upcoming products, etc. Hence, this is important to protect your email account against any malicious activities.
Read Also: Tips to Restore Outlook Emails from PST File
6 Best Ways to Protect Your Email Accounts
There are multiple email protection techniques available to protect email data, look at them to protect email from hackers:
#1 Method: Send Emails in Confidential Mode with Attachments
This is advisable to send emails and attachments by enabling confidential mode to protect your confidential information against unauthorized access. Using confidential mode users can send emails by setting an expiry date. Even confidential mode allows users to revoke access to email at any time. After the expiry date or removing access, recipients cannot forward, print, download, and copy emails. Several email providers like Google Workspace, Outlook, and many more provide the facility to send emails and attachments in confidential mode.
Send Confidential Email with Google Workspace
- Login to your Google Workspace account.
- Choose Compose for sending a new email.
- Then, select the Toggle confidential mode icon.
- After that, set expiration date accordingly.
- Enable No SMS Passcode or SMS Passcode and Save.
- Type recipients, subject, and email body content.
- Click Send to send a confidential email.
Send Confidential Email using Outlook
- Open your Microsoft Outlook client.
- Select the New Email button to continue.
- Type To, Cc, Subject, and email content.
- Choose File >> Info >> Properties option.
- Select Sensitivity as Confidential.
- Click Security Settings to encrypt email and attachments.
- Then hit the Send button to send an email with sensitivity level.
#2 Method: Turn on S/MIME Encryption to Secure Emails
You can enable S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension) to protect your email account from unauthorized use. Using S/MIME encryption, you can hide your confidential email messages from being read by unwanted users. Hence, this is advisable to encrypt your whole email account using your email service provider’s recommendations. After enabling S/MIME encryption, you can use public and private keys to encrypt and decrypt email messages.
#3 Method: Use Advance Settings to Protect Your Emails
Email service providers offer various advance options to secure email accounts. Hence, you need to enable these settings to protect your email data:
- Enable 2-Factor Authentication: Email service providers like Gmail and Outlook permit enabling 2-step verification or 2-factor authentication. After enabling 2FA, an extra layer of security will be added to your email accounts. Thereafter, if someone tries to log in to your account then it will send a special security code through an SMS.
- Protect Email with Strong Password: Experts recommend securing your email accounts with a strong and long password. This is advisable to set passwords containing mixed letters i.e. Uppercase, lowercase, numbers, symbols, and special characters. Hence, no one can easily understand your password.
#4 Method: Antispam Features to Secure Your Emails
Email Service providers offer different antispam features to move spam emails into spam folders. Thereafter, you will not receive spam emails in your Inbox folder so you can avoid opening spamming emails. If you think crucial emails are received in the spam folder then carefully check them by clicking on the spam folder.
Note: If you are receiving emails from some suspicious email addresses then timely block then to protect email from spamming.
#5 Method: Enable Antivirus for Email Protection
Various antivirus applications are available in the online market, you need to install and enable antivirus software on your computer. These antivirus tools scan your computer to eliminate malicious threads. If cyber fraudsters try to spread dangerous malware by sending an email with attachments, then antivirus programs will stop viruses from affecting your computer.
#6 Method: Keep Your Email Applications Up to Date
Sometimes users download email applications and use them to send and receive emails instead of web browser logins. But this is not recommended by experts because sometimes these may have some vulnerabilities and frauds can try to target you. Even this is also advisable to always use the latest version of email applications to reduce risk.
Read Next: Top 4 Methods to Export Outlook Email to MBOX File
Alternative Email Protection Technique
Email Backup Software is a great alternative to protect email accounts as it can save your emails in multiple standard formats. So, if you lose your crucial email data for any reason then you can restore them from backup. Hence, this is advisable to create a backup for your email accounts to avoid all the risks.
How to Protect Email Accounts?
- Launch the software on your machine and choose an email source.
- Enter account credentials and press Login from the software panel.
- Check email folders from the software window for creating replicas.
- Select a savin option accordingly (If you use Google Workspace then choose PST as saving, because PST file is compatible with Gmail.)
- Click the Backup button to create a duplicate backup of your emails.
Note that: Thereafter, if you lose your Google Workspace account data, then you can use Google’s GWMMO Tool to restore emails from the backup files.
Email Protection Questions
Q 1: Does a VPN protect emails?
Yes, a VPN (Virtual Private Network) can enhance the security of your email account. It encrypts the communication between your device and the email server, so it adds an external layer of security.
Q 2: How to protect email from spam?
Use a spam filter to protect your email from spam, thereafter, your emails will not come to your inbox folder.
Q 3: Which is the best technique to protect email accounts?
Send confidential emails and use encryption to protect email account data.
Conclusion
Above we have disclosed 6 manual methods and 1 alternative method to protect email accounts from unauthorized access. You need to follow the above-mentioned instructions and stay safe from hackers, phishing, spam, etc. Above recommended software is also useful for email protection as it creates replica folders of your account to restore them if your original data gets lost.