Secure your e-mail

We all use anti-virus and anti-spyware programs to help fight online threats but what about those we willfully let in with our e-mail clients. Here are a few tips you can use to make incoming and outgoing e-mail a little safer.

1. Don't allow your e-mail client to completely render HTML e-mails.
It is much safer to have your e-mail client render your incoming e-mails with limited HTML or better yet as plain text. Allowing full HTML rendering of your e-mail leaves you open as a valid recipient of spam or the risk of getting successfully phished by some malicious security cracker or identity thief.

2. Avoid free e-mail services.
Your POP3 account from your ISP is more secure than free e-mail services such as YahooMail, GMail and other free e-mail providers. ISP's usually require encryption to send and recieve e-mail and they do not sell or share your information.

3. Don't Access your e-mail account from an unsecured network.
We all want to check e-mail or banking while we're away on vacation. Often internet cafe's and free wireless access points are unsecure leaving your data open to the public.

4. Safe guard your address book users.
Address books are handy to send e-mail to all your friends and family with a simple click, however many trojans are designed to use your stored address book to send malicious code to all your users.

5. Use BBC when sending e-mail to multiple recipients.
Using BBC when sending e-mail to everyone in your address book ensures that each
user sees only his or her own e-mail address. Other recipients e-mail addresses are
hidden.