Best Practices for Email Security

In this post, let’s take a look at some of the best practices that you can follow to make your email safe and secure. The tips mentioned below will help you prevent your account from getting hacked and your address from being spoofed. You will also save yourself from malicious material that hackers may send your way.

Let’s get started. 

Set Strong Passwords

The first and most important thing you need to do for email security is set strong passwords for your email account.

If you have strong passwords, hackers won’t be able to guess them easily. This will give you a basic, yet very necessary, layer of security around your account.

As for what makes a password strong, make sure to include the following things in it:

• At least 10 characters (the standard 8 can be a bit weak)
• Numbers
• UPPERCASE and lowercase characters
• Symbols
• …spaces, if you feel like it

If you use a combination of all these elements in your password, it would be virtually uncrackable. Don’t make the mistake of picking your name as the password or your birthday, etc. Some people like to be a bit witty and just keep “password” as their password, but…it’s a bit old now.

You can test your password using an online password strength checker to see how hard it is to crack.

Set up 2-Factor authentication

Another step that you can take to make your account more secure is setting up 2-factor authentication.

With 2FA, any new device signing into your email has to confirm a code sent to your registered phone number. That way, even if someone managed to guess your password, they would still not be able to gain access to your account. They would have to fetch the code, which they wouldn’t be able to do unless they had your phone.

You can set up 2FA easily using your email client. If you are using Gmail, you can enable 2FA for your entire Google account by following these steps:

1. Go to your Google Account. 
2. Click on Security in the left-hand menu.
3. Find the section labeled How you sign in to Google and turn on 2-Step Verification.
4. Follow the instructions provided on the screen to enable the feature.

Use a reliable and secure email client

Nowadays, most people use Gmail or Outlook as their email clients. As far as these two names go, they are secure, and users have nothing to worry about. However, if you are thinking of using a client other than these, make sure that it is reliable and secure.

1. Do online research and see what other users have to say about the client before you use it. Normally, if an email client is popular enough to be mentioned and used on the internet, it has its fair share of reviews and testimonials as well. If a vital security feature happens to be missing, it will be discussed by users online.
2. Make sure to check the features provided by the email client. Check whether they provide an automatic virus/malware detection feature, SPF, and DMARC protection (more on this in the next heading), end-to-end encryption, spam filtering, and so on. The list of features will show you how secure or otherwise the client is to use.

Set up SPF and DMARC records for your domain

This is an important measure to take if you want to secure the emails coming to and going from your domain. When you’re not using an email client and are instead using an address from your own, such as mail@123.com, you need to properly configure these records.

What exactly are the SPF and DMARC records?

• SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records are used to describe the email servers and other domains that are authorized to send emails on behalf of your domain. When this record is published in the DNS zone of the domain, the receiving server is able to check it. The recipient checks whether the server behind the email has been cleared by your domain. If not, then the email is regarded as unreliable and discarded.
• DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) records are used to outline what happens if incoming emails fail the SPF record check. There are different routines that can be set up using the DMARC records, such as quarantining the emails, ignoring them, or blocking them altogether.

You can set up the SPF and DMARC records for your domain by visiting your control panel. In cPanel, for example, you can set up these records via the Zone Editor. Both the SPF and DMARC records are added as TXT records in the zone.

Once you are done adding the records, you should also make sure that they are correctly set up by using a DNS record checker. The DNS record will not only show you the SPF and DMARC records, but also the other vital ones responsible for your domain. 

Be careful when opening links and attachments

Most of the time, people get affected by malware via email when they are not careful regarding the links and attachments that they open. Even if an attachment or link is deemed as “safe” by the email client, you should be careful about opening it.

Consider the following things when opening the links/attachments:

• Are they from a reliable sender on your list?
• Does the written content of the email look safe?
• Does the link or attachment seem relevant to the rest of the content of the email, or is it suspiciously random/unrelated?

If you deem that the link/attachment is from someone reliable and is related to the written content (which also looks safe), then you can go ahead and open it.

Wrapping Up

It is important to be cautious and careful when sending and receiving emails from other people on the internet. There are various steps that you can take to ensure that you don’t fall prey to cybercrime or become a victim of malicious online activity.

In the post above, we have highlighted some steps that you can take in this regard. To recap them quickly, make sure to keep strong passwords for your email account, set up 2FA, use a reliable email client, set up SPF and DMARC for your domain, and be cautious when opening attachments/links.