Wireless Reading Devices

Almost all of us have experienced the daily exposure to hundreds of spam email messages.   While that has become commonplace – especially for PC users that interact heavily with email – it is not where the real problem lies.  Having your email address and password obtained illegally – especially for truly fraudulent purposes and the general access to your private doings is where the real exposure lies.  It is fairly easy to take password type data from emails and match that against demand fields in all the accounts that you regularly use to run your life.  

So, how does one go about truly securing your email – addresses, passwords, and history – to prevent or largely eliminate anyone from getting it.  While there are many things technical – from securing your office network to physically securing human access to your office PC.  Those are not the function of this article.  What we are dealing with here are the things that you can do to truly improve the overall level of security of your email account data – both at home and at work.

You should opt for security over ease of use in all your PC and email security issues.   Phishing and hacking rely on gaining access to private data by grabbing it when it is out in the open – your emails – and when it floats on private-access accounts via auto-login headers.   So, the first thing that you should eliminate is ANY auto-login where key Account ID and Password data may be ‘grabbed’.   Many people are opposed to this as it does make using many online access accounts very efficient by not requiring you to look up many User ID and Password combinations. 

If all you do is eliminate this kind of usage regarding your primary email accounts and especially is you use public access PCs like in libraries, then you will not be leaving a data footprint behind that can be copied.

If you are a heavy email user – meaning you use email every hour in conducting business – then you should minimize your exposure by using multiple email accounts.  This is especially true with regard to financial accounts like online banking accounts. 

Never use account names, user ID’s, and passwords on financial account access that are also used for your basic email accounts.  Most people who have had a general theft of this kind of private data have been found to reuse the same passwords throughout their personal network of memberships and emails.  It is certainly convenient but reusing this data is EXTREMELY risky.

Use an HTTPS connection – rather than just an HTTP connection – when possible and always use public provider email access platform – this is now standard for all the quality sites like Yahoo! and Google.  This will encrypt your email – and its header information – as it moves over the net, eliminating ‘sniffer’ hacks to get your IDs and Passwords.

Increase your overall level of PC security so as to prevent resident malware and virus access to the passwords that are resident on your PC.  This means using the best security software and reviewing its status and functioning on a regular basis.

Finally, keep a “clean” PC environment with regard to your system registry by regularly using registry software to maintain your registry.  If you have performance degradation then you can do a registry fix with commercial software and achieve the registry repair.