Wednesday, March 28, 2012

E-mail Security and Safety

By Jennifer Flowers


E-mail security is important. By employing good e-mail security protocols, you can bring many benefits to your company. You make it harder for people to steal important data from you. In addition, you protect yourself from viruses. If you have good e-mail security you can also, to a certain extent, protect your clients.

Avoid allowing an e-mail client system to completely render HTML or XHTML e-mails whenever possible. Configure mail clients such as Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird to render only simplified HTML rather than rich HTML, or better still plain text. If you fully render HTML, you can end up identifying yourself as a valid recipient for spam or run the risk of being phished.

In the event the privacy of your data is very important or critical for you, make use of a local IMAP or POP3 client to retrieve your e-mail. That means staying away from Web-based e-mail services like Gmail, Hotmail, and also Yahoo. Even in the event your Webmail service provider's policies seem sufficiently privacy-oriented to you, that doesn't mean that staff members won't sometimes break the policies.

Ensure that your email-based authentication process is completely encrypted, even if the e-mail is not at all times. This can stop a security cracker from listening in on the authentication session. If anyone does find a way to listen in they could send e-mails as you and receive your e-mail. Look at your Web service Provider's policies to see if the authentication process is encrypted.

At all times, digitally sign all of your e-mails. Consider utilizing an encryption tool like PGP or GnuPG to digitally sign your e-mails. Doing this enables you to start using a private encryption key.

General good practice is to avoid accessing important e-mails over a public computer. However, also try to avoid doing so over a public Wi-Fi network. For some e-mails, you are better off having your PA open them in the office and actioning them for you.

In the unusual event, that somebody does get control over an e-mail account. Alter the password, then send an email to the entire contact list to let them understand what has happened. List all those mail messages you did not send out yourself and tell them if they opened some of these messages their e-mails may perhaps be infected too. You ought to explain the things they have to do to make their accounts secure. The very fact your e-mail account may be hacked can look very bad; however the effects of not being truthful about this and forewarning your clients are usually much worse.




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