Securing Your Email Account

The most important and vulnerable account in your digital life is your email account. Your email can be the doorway to access numerous linked accounts and personal information.

If an email account is compromised, a malicious actor could have the ability to:

• Read all of your messages, intercept incoming communications and alter the message before sending to the recipient
• Set up rules to re-route or delete incoming messages without your knowledge.
• Reset account passwords and potentially access and manipulate information in your linked accounts
• Successfully log in to your banking, financial, cryptocurrency, social media and other personal accounts full of your sensitive personal and financial information.
• Impersonate you and open new accounts and even branch out to target your unsuspecting contacts.

To reduce the risk of an Email compromise,

• Use a very strong and complex password or passphrase
• Enable 2FA on all email accounts when possible to add another layer of security. Check out our guide on how to ensure that dual factor authentication is set up and enabled on your email account.

It is recommended to avoid using a free email service to link to your important online accounts. Most free email services do not provide adequate support to anyone attempting to recover their account after an email compromise. Instead, use an email service (such as ProtonMail Unlimited or a Gmail business account) that provides not only support for customers, but can also encrypt emails for added security. The increased level of support for the paid service could be invaluable if there was ever a need for account recovery assistance.