All You Need to Know to Create a Secure E Mail

While email has lost some of its appeal as a communication tool over the years and is replaced by other services, having a secure email account is still necessary for a lot of things.

You need an email address to sign up to social media networks, buy things online, sign up to websites, activate your smartphone and so on.

Your email address is also connected with your bank and contains sensitive information about you that you don’t want to fall into the wrong hands.

In this article, we’ll show you several things you should do to have the most secure email against hackers and other bad actors, as well as what to look for in the best secure e mail provider.

How to Discover Secure Email Providers?

Why you should use secure email services?

You probably already have an email account with one of the major email providers. Nothing wrong with that if all you need is an easy-to-use email service that’s available for free.

However, these email services will provide very little protection against a determined hacker or a man-in-the-middle attack. That is why you need an encrypted email service provider.

How to find secure email providers that can protect your email privacy and security?

Luckily, today there’s no lack of option when it comes to secure email services from using disposable email accounts, anonymous email services, to end-to-end encrypted email service providers.

As we believe the latest will give you the most secure email, we’ll explain how to find and set up your email account.

Top Features to Look for in Encrypted Email Providers

First of all, here are the top features to look at if you want to find the best private email service:

They Use End-to-End Encryption

End-to-end encryption is today a must-have if you want a secure email service. With it, only the sender and the recipient can read the messages they send to each other.

As digital communication continues to evolve, emerging technologies like QR codes for realtors demonstrate innovative ways professionals can bridge the gap between physical and online spaces.

By incorporating these methods, real estate agents can efficiently utilize secure email services to share QR codes that provide direct access to property listings and virtual tours without compromising client information.

Most commonly today, email providers will use PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) or its open-source alternatives OpenPGP and GnuPG.

Where are the Servers and Data Centers Located?

Choose an email service that has its servers in a country with strong privacy laws. For instance, if the provider keeps its servers in the US, Canada, or the UK, that’s a bad sign since these are all 5 Eyes countries and their government agencies are heavily involved in surveillance.

Make Sure They Use Two-Factor Authentication

You should, of course, use a strong and unique password, but there’s always a chance that someone will learn or crack your password.

Two-factor authentication, or 2FA will add to your password protection and make sure that your email account is even harder to break into, so be sure to use email clients that support 2FA.

Do They Strip Metadata Headers?

Metadata headers contain a lot of user data, including what device or web browser you’re using and more, so it’s important to use an email service provider that will protect your privacy by stripping out metadata headers.

They Offer Anti-Phishing

Phishing attacks today come in all types and forms and your secure email service should at the very least be able to detect malicious links and attachments that may include malware for you. If, in addition, it also uses NLP (Natural Language Processing) to detect social engineering or BEC (business email compromise)-based email attacks, that’s even better.

Email Count Takeover Prevention

Coming back to phishing attacks, one of the main reasons cybercriminals use them is to take over email accounts. For instance, a cyberattacker may convince an employee to enter their login info into a phishing website and that way takeover any accounts with those credentials.

To prevent this, use an email service that offers account takeover prevention by blocking access attempts from suspicious IP addresses.

Why You Should Use a Secure Email Service in the First Place?

Secure email providers encrypt your emails in transit and at rest. This means that your messages and other data are secure from cyberthreats as you’re sending and receiving messages, but also when the message is already on your mail server.

This is not the case with regular email providers, which only have email encryption in transit (TLS), but not at rest (PGP).

Further, a secure email provider encrypts messages on the sender side with encryption keys and only the intended recipients can read them using decryption keys.

How to Set Up a Secure Email Account With Ease?

Now that you know how to find a good end-to-end email service, let’s talk about how to set up a secure and private email account.

• Use a unique password

We already mentioned the importance of using a strong and unique password for your email account, but we must stress it again.

Your email password should be something that is not commonly used or will easily lead to you.

Your password should also contain 8 characters at least (more is better), including small caps, large caps, numbers and special characters. Unfortunately, most passwords use only 8 or even fewer characters.

• Don’t use personal information

A good idea to consider if you want a secure email account is to make it anonymous.

For instance, you might use two email accounts. One for work and people you know and the other as a more private email.

• Set up 2FA

We already talked about 2FA and why your secure email service must have it. Depending on your provider, setting up multi-factor authentication may be slightly different.

Here is how to set up 2FA with CTemplar:

1. Click on the cog icon in the upper right (Settings);
2. Go to Security;
3. Click the Set Up 2 Factor Authentication link;
4. Scan the QR code or enter the secret key and click Next;
5. Enter your account password and 2FA passcode generated by the app and click Enable.

You should receive a confirmation message that you’ve successfully enabled 2FA now.

• Use email aliases

An alias is a specific type of forwarding address that you can use to send and receive emails or set forwards to. You may have several aliases (for instance, 10 with CTemplar Prime), both within the same and within different domains.

For example, you might need to use multiple addresses for your organization for different purposes. Instead of creating an account for each, you can set up email aliases and when someone emails you on one of these aliases, the message will be forwarded to your account.

Looking for The Most Secure Email Services?

Finding the best secure email provider is not easy, but there are a lot of options ahead of you when it comes to encrypted email.

CTemplar is an end-to-end encrypted email provider with a mission to protect your privacy, because we believe this is a human right worth fighting for.

If you believe this as well and want to improve your data security, sign up to your CTemplar account today.