One very important point about email is, it’s not secure unless you implement security using digital id’s to begin with. This means your emails could be read by a third party.

E-mail security. As a general rule of thumb, unless you are using a secure package make sure you never send confidential information via email, this includes credit card numbers or any usernames and passwords.

There are a people out there who would love to get hold of your internet banking credentials, but there are some who are actually trying to do this via email.

If ever you get an email from your bank, e-Bay, PayPal or any other website asking you to login or verify account information the chances are this will be a scam.

The email will have a link on the page, it will look the same as the normal website you login to, if you click on it you will be even taken to a page that looks like the one from your bank or PayPal account etc, but as soon as you try to login, you won’t get very far, in the meantime you’ve now give someone access to your account, via a bogus website.

The next scam via email is the attachment this will probably be some kind of key logging software, once you’ve opened this all characters on your keyboard are recorded or logged into a text file which is then uploaded to a web location ready for someone to download and sift through it to see if they can find any account information.

The long and short of e mail security is, never open attachments if you’re not sure who sent them. Even then be careful, if your friends computer has a virus and it has the capability to send emails from the address book of course you will receive this.

Secondly never go to a secure website from an email, if you get an email from your bank or other business asking you to login and verify account information, or someone has apparently hacked into your account and they have stopped it.

But they need you to login to confirm who you are, or you’ve been asked to take part in a survey, but you’ll need to login, of course all these are scams they even give you a link on the email page.

So never go to a website any website such as banking etc from an email. If you receive an email from your bank and you think it’s real, login through your browser and actually type the address, never ever use the address in the email.

These kind of people send email pretending to be Banks, Auction sites, Pay sites, plus more, basically anyone or anything they think they can steal money from.

If you think that you’ve already entered account information into a scam site, contact your sites provider, i.e. your bank etc immediately.

If you’ like to setup your e mail security to stop some attachments , from Outlook Express go to the tools menu and select options, now choose the e mail security tab, you will be shown the screen below.

computer-adviser e-mail security article

From here we can specify and implement some email security.

Virus Protection
Select the Internet security Explorer zone to use,

Here we can choose Internet or restricted sites zone, Choose the restricted zone option.

Warn me when other applications try to send email as me

Have this selected just for piece of mind in case any third party applications have mailing capabilities and a virus or spyware is using them.

Do not allow attachments to be saved or opened that could potentially be a virus
Again definitely worth having this ticked to begin with, after that if you find it’s blocking too many valid email attachments you can change this.

Download Images
Block images and other external content in HTML e-mail
You could have a malicious script run through this so better to be safe and tick. You can always choose to downloads the content after the email has arrived and you are satisfied it’s ok.

Secure email
If you wish to setup a secure ID to increase you mail security it’s an ID file a little like a passport for your computer follow the prompts here, starting with “ Tell me more “ , it can be a bit of a lengthy procedure though, but if you send and receive a lot of confidential matter it’s worth it.

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computer adviser e-mail security article