Most of us take precautions to protect our physical identities from thieves and scammers, but what about our digital identities? Email addresses are one of the most important pieces of information we have online, and they can be easy targets for spammers. Here are a few tips on how to protect your email address from spammer attacks.
1. Don’t give your email address freely
Make sure you only share your email address on trustworthy sites and spaces, or when required by a website. This will help you avoid having it distributed to spammers who might try to add it to their campaign of targeted emails. If you absolutely must use an email aggregating service like Gmail, make sure to take advantage of their security features. You can, for example, set rules to automatically label all messages sent from certain email domains as “spam” or delete them outright.
2. Create your own custom domain (optional)
If you’re seriously concerned about guarding your emails, the best thing you can do is create a custom email address for yourself by getting your own domain. A custom email gives you an extra layer of protection against spam campaigns, because spammers won’t know that the mail they’re sending goes to a specific person. A custom email also lets you separate work emails from personal ones so people can easily tell them apart.
3. Use encryption (optional)
If you do business or correspond with other people using your email address, then you should consider getting a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to encrypt the data traveling between your computer and your online destinations. There are also some great services that provide end-to-end protection for emails themselves. With ProtonMail, for example, all of your emails are encrypted on your computer before they’re sent, so they can’t be read if the email service provider is forced to grant access to your account.
The company adds that it tries “as much as possible” to keep all customer information within Switzerland but it isn’t legally able to do so in every case. The firm notes that Swiss laws make it illegal to install backdoors and spy on user messages.
The bottom line: Take steps to protect your online presence, including your email account, from spam campaigns and other hacking attempts.
Never reply to a spam E-mail
Spammers often send messages that look like they’re from a legitimate source, in an attempt to get you to reply and give them your personal information. If you reply, you might end up giving the spammer access to your email account or even worse, your financial information.
To avoid this, always be very careful about what emails you open and never reply to any spam message. If you think an email might be spam, don’t hesitate to contact the company it supposedly came from to check.
How to Stop Spam Emails
One way to stop spam emails is simply by not giving out your email address. If you don’t have an online presence, then there’s nothing for spammers to try to steal. Of course, this also means that you won’t be able to recieve any legitimate messages.
You can also choose to use an email provider like Gmail who takes steps to protect your emails from spam, and you should also follow the tips in this article. If someone is already spamming your email address, then contact them and ask that they stop. You can take it a step further by contacting the company that sent the message on your behalf to ask them to blacklist your address.
You could also try using an encryption service like ProtonMail, which automatically encrypts all incoming emails with end-to-end encryption. This means that no one can read your emails, even if they gain access to the email provider’s servers. The only way for someone to get inside is by hacking your computer’s encryption keys, which is very unlikely.
If you don’t want to use something so secure, there are other options out there that will help protect your emails from being scanned for keywords. For example, you can use a VPN service to encrypt your email data before it leaves your computer. This way, the information traveling between you and your email provider can’t be read.
No matter what you choose, make sure to adjust your settings so that all incoming emails are encrypted. This will ensure that no one can read them or even know you’re using the service in the first place.