Email security

  Jeroen Seynhaeve     2022-12-06 Email security

Just like the security of any digital data, managing the security of your email is not a simple matter of flipping a switch or installing an app.

Rather, it is a combination of measures on both sides of the data traffic – sender and recipient. While you may have no control over what happens to emails once they leave your mail server, there are a number of things you can do to take responsibility for email security on your side:

1. Strong passwords

Make sure your email password is “strong”, and update your password regularly. Let me know if you want to update your email password – you can do this directly on your mail server. Get tips on what makes a password strong here.

2. Avoid eavesdropping

Avoid connecting to Wifi in restaurants, airports, etc. These networks are prone to “man-in-the-middle” attacks.

3. Detect phishing

Always check the actual email address the email is sent from. Criminals will try and mimic reputable companies to extract sensitive information from you. For example, they may pretend to be your financial institution, or your government, or your email provider, in the hope that you submit information via websites they control.

4. Don’t click hyperlinks

Don’t click links that appear in email content, unless you are certain that the email is sent from a reliable source. Always scan the link before you click it.

5. Activate SSL/TLS

Encrypt your emails with SSL/TLS by updating the ports to 995 (POP) / 993 (IMAP) and 465 on all your devices. This sounds scary ;-) but it’s easy to do – and I cannot do this remotely for you. Activating SSL/TLS may not be 100% foolproof, but it will make it much harder for anyone with access to your mail server or email traffic to read the content of your emails.

For email hosted by Online Brand Ambassadors: please note that our supplier also applies its own encryption software on the mail servers that host your email. This is particularly important for those of you that use IMAP which stores a copy of your email on the mail server indefinitely (until you remove it).