In this day and age, the physical and digital worlds are becoming increasingly interconnected. Your identity online is almost equivalent to who you are in real life. Unfortunately, it has also become much easier to hijack that identity via cybercriminal attacks and phishing attempts to gain access to your personal data. The data they can acquire can allow them to masquerade themselves as ‘you’ for their purposes or to hold you hostage over sensitive and necessary information that you require to function in our modern world, or whatever else they want to do with it.

One of the more active avenues of these kinds of attacks is through the emails you send and receive. As a result, a cybercriminal might gain access to confidential information, which can drastically affect you and your colleagues. This concern is mitigated by being careful while screening through what emails you have received and making sure that only the intended recipients can access your messages. To this end, we’ve compiled a few tips for you, allowing you to make make sure that the emails you send are safe and secure from attempts to steal your data.

Encrypt Your Email:

A standard way of protecting your messages from prying eyes is to encrypt them. Encryption via various methods such as text ciphers has a long and rich history, and in the modern age, computer scientists have advanced the field immensely. New encryption methods have been developed that are complex and very strong. These effectively scramble your message in such a way that only the intended recipients can unscramble it. No one besides them, not even the email service itself, not even a powerful computer, can break the encryption to see the information inside. 500mail offers end-to-end encryption so that your messages stay hidden and inaccessible to anyone trying to access them besides the people whom you’ve sent them to.

Limit Forwarding:

To make sure that the data you send over emails isn’t accidentally forwarded to somewhere else (by, for example, a hacked account), or to reduce the risk of forwarding an email outside of encrypted channels (which can expose it to bad actors for their purposes), you can choose to limit the number of times it can be forwarded. Email service providers often include a feature to let the recipient inbox know that it should not be forwarded by making it read-only. This ensures that the data and attachments are only usable for the people it is intended for.

Add Message Expiration Dates:

In the same vein as the above, you can also add an expiration date that locks out the recipient, or anyone else, from reading it after a certain time has passed. In essence, the email is destroyed, and accessing the data becomes impossible even after it has been received, perhaps either by accident or malpractice, by someone other than the intended recipient. However, do take care to know that some email services simply add this as a tag. This tag simply identifies that the information within is only valid for a certain period of time before the expiry date, after which it still remains usable. Information can still be gleaned from it, even if the data attached in the email is considered outdated for the people sending it.

Use a Secure Email Service Provider:

Many email provider and software are available for either private use or a company-wide base. We advise that you look for a service that is right for you, based on factors such as:

• The kind of encryption used
• The functionalities included allowing you to protect your email
• Their terms of service regarding your privacy
• Their rules regarding how to use and process the data you send to them and through their service
• The user interface; how well and smoothly the software itself performs and feels to use 500Mail is a service that offers excellent end-to-end secure email encryption and a swathe of features to protect your data online, bundled into a clean, minimalistic, and optimized user interface for you to enjoy working with.