Simple steps to secure your email account

Email services with collaboration is a norm nowadays and most users keep critical data on the cloud. With this great power that you get from your email services, it would come with a greater responsibility to protect your account. 

As a continuation from the previous topic of identity theft with domain name, the same thing could also happen when somebody hijack your email account. The hacker could cause a lot of damage if they could gain unauthorized access to your email account. Your email account could contain your password, top secret email, password retrieval email and etc. The last thing that you need is nasty emails being sent out from your email account to your contacts. Is this enough to scare you off from having an email account? You do not have to worry and delete your email account now, I will provide few simple measures that you could do to secure your email account so that you would not have to fall back to pigeon post.

With 12 years experience in the web hosting industry and numerous encounter with email account intrusion, you could follow these recipe to secure your email account:

1. Password
This is the most crucial and first line defense of your email account. A weak password is a recipe for disaster. Password such as 'abc123', 'qwerty', '123456' and etc. are too common and these are the first few combinations that a hacker will attempt. A strong password would consist of upper case, lower case, numbers and symbols. If your name is Michael and you would want a password that is easy to remember, you could try something like 'W1cH@3LM2012'. The strength of this password would definitely turn the hacker off. A good password is a strong password and easy to be remembered by you.

2. Email Service provider
Depending on your email hosting package, a good provider will enforce minimum password strength policy and having at least a brute force attack firewall to fend of unauthorized access.

3. Choosing a unique email username
david@domain.com, mary@domain.com, peter@domain.com and etc. are too common and it is based on the word from dictionary. I would recommend you to use firstname.lastname@domain.com as these words are not from a single line in the dictionary. Aside from increasing your account security, you could also reduce the amount of spam coming to your account.

4. Check your PC for virus
A badly infected machine could contain virus that is able to manipulate your email client (Outlook, Thunderbird and etc.) as well as your browser's saved passwords. Most of the time, the user would not aware that the virus is actually exploiting your email account as the process is always running on the background. A virus could be a medium in your machine to relay your account information back to the hacker or it could be a spambot which reside in your machine and turn it into a spamming gateway. Always get a qualified technician to scan your machine periodically and get a good antivirus software.

I hope these few simple steps will save you from the misery of experiencing email account exploitation.