LostInTechnology

It seems like today, there are more spammers, scammers and hackers than ever. Most feel helpless, without hope that anything can stop these evil doers. However, there are definitely some tricks and things you can keep in mind when using email to make your experience as secure as possible.

Questions

One of the most common ways of getting someone else’s email credentials is through those “security questions” you answer when you first create your email account. Unfortunately, with the dawn of Facebook, Formspring.me and more, your “security question” answers are most likely answered  by you elsewhere, where a would be hacker could find them.

Leo Laporte came up with an alternative to these usually mandatory questions. By answering the questions with incorrect, but memorable answers, you can avoid your email getting hacked.

Passwords

Unfortunately, most people still do not understand how to create passwords. In fact, most passwords are like “password”, “12345″ and “asdfg”.  A password must be a carefully chosen, memorable string of characters that is not a word or a sequential string of numbers. Good passwords are a combination of numbers and letters, perhaps your house number, and then your loved one’s first initials. (But using this type of password creation should not be predictable!) LostInTechnology has two great articles on passwords.

Be Smart

You know that old saying “If it looks too good to be true, it probably is”? This applies directly to scams and spammers in your inbox. If you recieve an email the seems suspicious, don’t reply, and try not to open it. Sometimes, if you open it, hackers use tricks to know if you’ve opened it. So, use common sense when dealing with your email inbox.

Use Gmail

This is perhaps the best piece of advice. Gmail is a great email provider that is known for its great spam filters. But not only that, Gmail has two great features that makes your email secure. The first captures your IP address (basically, your unique internet location address) every time you check your email. This alone can help you, by showing you all the past log in locations. If a log is from another IP address, you can infer that someone else is accessing your email (or it was you at another place). Gmail also has a built in detector that alerts you if another IP address that is logged is suspicious.

Gmail also has the option to setup encryption for email reading, using HTTPS. You can do this by going into Gmail settings, and enabling the HTTPS encyption option. Finally, Gmail gives you the option to receive a text message when ever someone tries to use the password recovery. This is a good way to prevent hackers from gaining access to your email. (Note: Leo Laporte mentioned this during an episode of TWiT, but I would love if a commenter could leave a link with the documentation.)

What do you use to securely email? Let us know in the comments.

The writer of this post compiles the latest tech news and more at Squealing Rat, and writes about tricks and tips of deception, trickery and survival at Lone Iguana. Find him on Twitter.

Photo: CarbonNYC