Email marketing has emerged as one of the greatest tools of communication. At the same time, you need to work on email security to avoid cybercriminals for any attack on your privacy. Email is a nice way to promote a product or service. If you use it, you can decently kick-start the communication workflow. Many businesses use email, therefore, email security best practices are needed to secure information and private data.
Attackers are consistently busy finding ways to exploit that information and breach the defense system deployed by the organizations to secure their emails. An email address and the email sent from you are your identities that are displayed in a mailbox.
Keeping your email program is not that easy but fortunately, some email security best practices can be followed to make it secure. If you are looking for them, you are at the right place.
Read this blog to learn the best practices that you will need in 2023.
Table of Contents
- What is email security?
- Email security best practices
- Use strong passwords
- Train your employees
- Use two-factor authentication
- Update your password regularly
- Don’t open suspicious attachments without scanning
- Do not share your email password
- Don’t use official emails for personal use
- Conclusion
What Is Email Security?
Email security is a method to protect important data and email account(s) from an outer malicious threat. Hackers and nosy competitors are always busy stealing important data using weak spots. They want to do it in order to use your sender, domain, and IP reputation.
They can use your healthy IP and domain to land in the recipient’s mailboxes to carry out phishing attacks. This process highly damages your established trust in the eyes of the users. Due to these and many other factors, email security best practices have become the talk of the town to take measures to avoid giving your precious information into the wrong hands.
Email Security Best Practices
Spammers leave no stone unturned to attack your email account to try phishing attacks on your users. Here are the email security best practices you must follow to avoid cyberattacks. Read them one by one:
Use Strong Passwords
Simple passwords are easy to steal and hacked. Always use a strong password for your email account that should be difficult for a guesstimate, but at the same time memorable by you. Some of the simply use their name, nickname, or digits as a password which is not a good practice.
Your email password needs to be an amalgamation of the characters, special characters, digits, uppercases, and lowercase. Not only this, do not use the same password for every account rather go with a different and stronger one.
The reason behind this is that if a hacker finds it, he will try it on every account without wasting a moment. You need to use this practice not only for business email accounts, rather, but this email security best practice should be applied to personal email accounts as well.
If you use an easier password, you are giving a window to the hacker to step in and access all your data.
Train Your Employees
Sometimes, untrained employees become the bane of email security. Due to their ignorance regarding email security best practices, they get easily trapped in cyberattacks. In order to save your reputation, you need to arrange some seminars and special training on how to avoid cyberattacks.
Also, after equipping them with the appropriate training, you need to keep testing their behavior over and over again with fake attacks. Usually, the spammers send malware and upon clicking this software gets installed in your system which proves to be a low-hanging fruit for the hackers.
Also, they access your information by that means and use it for their malicious intentions. No matter how responsive and effective protection software and tools you use for your email security, they are not 100% safe to be trusted. Moreover, most of the biggest scams happen due to human error.
Data speaks tones of it. according to a research report conducted by IBM, the $3.3 million cost of breaches was caused due to human error in the year 2020. When you train your employees well, they protect the information to the fullest.
Email security training programs must regularly be conducted to keep the employees aware to deal with any nuisance.
Use Two-Factor Authentication for Email Security
Two-factor authentication aka 2FA is another email security best practice that adds a fine layer of protection. As a matter of fact, you have to log in by accessing the second authentication source, but that can save you from a malicious attack.
Two-factor authentication can be deployed on OTP (one-time passcodes), or TOTP (time-based one-time password) manner. You can use 2FA by using an SMS, email, API tokens, push notification, etc.
Two-factor authentication is highly worth it because even if a hacker gets your password, he needs to enter a code to log in that will be in your access.
Update Your Passwords Regularly
Keeping your email passwords constantly updated reduces hacking chances to a larger extent. Some organizations have made it compulsory for employees to update or consider changing their passwords frequently.
Normally, these organizations set a timeframe of 90 days to change the password of an account. Other than this practice, you can set a certain time period for yourself to change your password.
Sometimes, when your password gets leaked, the hackers keep a watch on the communication silently to wait for the right information. If you change the password, they will not get any further information and your data will be secured.
Don’t Open Suspicious Attachments Without Scanning
If you want to keep your system and information safe with you, follow the email security best practice to not open any suspicious attachments without scanning them. We use our personal or business email to communicate with others.
As far as a business email account is concerned, it is used to communicate outside and inside the organization. Sometimes, we receive emails with attachments and we open them up unconsciously.
This is basically malware that gets automatically installed in your system and proved to be a spot for the breach. No matter what the email source is, move it to the trash bin instantaneously as soon as you find any doubtful email.
Along with it, inform the higher authorities at the earliest about this attack so that they take rapid measures to look into the matter for collective benefit.
Do Not Share Your Email Password
Sharing your email password can be more disastrous than you think. We never support you share your password with any friend, colleague, or company. This is also a fact that reputed companies do not ask for passwords.
They keep themselves to the point with the relevant information that they want to convey or obtain. For example, if you receive a phone call from a person pretending to be a representative of Yahoo, and ask for the password, run away, this is a scam.
Don’t Use Official Emails for Personal Use
Allowing your employees to use official or business email for personal use can be terrible. If you allow them to use that email for signing up for services or shopping online, it will invite various risks. Not only this but do not allow your employees to send official emails from their personal accounts.
Email sent through a personal account will put your important data at stake if that account gets hacked. Using a personal account for personal communication, and a business email account for business communication is one of the best email security best practices.
Conclusion
Email marketing is taking lead to offer the best communication services. You can use it for personal use, or for business to increase your return on investment. Further, the best thing about this channel is that you can engage your audience the way you want. For that, you need to design a perfect email strategy.
Along with this, certain challenges can be faced regarding your email security. We suggest you follow the above-mentioned email security best practices to keep your information and email account secure.
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