Email Security for Virtual Office

By Kapil Bulsara | January 12, 2016

Important confidential information is shared via email on a regular basis so it is very important to maintain good security for your email accounts. It goes without saying that “123” is not a good password for your email account but you’d be surprised how liberal people are with setting easy to guess passwords.

Set a strong Password

Here is a good set of guidelines:

Try to use a non-dictionary words
Include uppercase, lowercase, numeric and symbol characters in your password
Set policy to change password every 72 to 90 days

Do not share your password

No matter how strong your password it, it is useless if you share it with someone. Do not under any circumstance share your password with anyone in your company. If you have a personal assistant who sends e-mails on your behalf, you can give limited send access to them – your IT admin will be able to assist you with this, and if not, please contact us.

Try to not use public Wi-Fi Hotspots

Sure it may be convenient to use Wi-fi hotspots at your local Starbucks, Second Cup or Tim Hortons, but these networks are mostly free and ‘open’ meaning that whatever you transmit may be unencrypted and visible to anyone with a few simple tools.

Use Secure connection

If you do have to use a free public Wi-fi hotspot, make sure you use HTTPS instead of HTTP. Just remember “S for Secure”. Also when using email clients like Outlook or Mail ensure that you use SSL or TSL connection for all email accounts.

Second Reliable Recovery Email Account

Set a reliable recovery email account in case your primary email gets hijacked.

Be Sensible with secret question and answers

Pick questions and answers that will not be easy to guess by strangers and even people that you are close to as such co-workers and friends. Too often email accounts get hijacked due to weak secret questions or answers.

Go a Step Further

You can go even a step further and something which is usually recommended and that is you can enforce a strict policy of using only encrypted company phones and laptops to check emails and set firewall rules that allow access to emails from certain IP address.