Tech Talk : Email

By Dave Rutledge

    Email has become a lifeblood of our society, and still can be viewed as a new thing to a lot of computer users. Various companies provide their own free email services that can be accessed over the Internet, but none are without their flaws. If you are looking for a more professional and secure way of conducting your emails, an email provider with POP3, SMTP, SMTP, or other methods that allow you to download your email to your computer is in order.

Free email providers are abundant on the web now, and they provide the basic service of sending and receiving email. If all you are doing is sending  a joke list to all of your close friends these emails are sufficient. All of these services do come at a price however, and are really only “free” in the fact they don’t cost money. Otherwise they come with a host of problems including something as simple as annoying advertisements, purging of old mail in inactive accounts, purging accounts when they are over their limit, and a variety of security and privacy concerns. Some free providers automatically check the boxes to sign up to their affiliates newsletters, so when signing up if you don’t want an instant mountain of spam be diligent and look for and uncheck all of these boxes. What’s worse is some providers are known to share your email address with their affiliates without your permission, which is how you get spam without ever giving out your new email address.

Security concerns of free email services are abundant, and since they are web based interfaces new problems arise as new issues are discovered and exploited. Google based Gmail has recently been discovered to be insecure with their contact lists. The vulnerability lies in browsers that use tabs, such as Firefox, IE 7.x.x, Opera, etc. Basically what happens is if you stay logged into Gmail and use a tab in the same window to view another website, that website could have a command built into it that retrieves all the addresses off of your contact list and personal email address. This can vary in degrees of security to that of an annoyance, to an outright breach of confident information. Also this hack allows really savvy individuals to fake an email from a trusted address, in order to get you to open it and respond with confidential information. It’s certainly only a matter of time until such hacks are found and exploited in the other well-known free email providers.

Now keep in mind that no email is absolutely secure, the information goes through a multitude of servers to get to you, with anyone along the way being able to grab the email and read the information within, this holds true for any paid or free provider. However email from a provider that you can download to your hard disk allows for a certain degree of safety to you, the end user. You can set your anti-virus software to scan emails as they come into your computer, and even as you send them out. To download the email to your computer you need a program to do so. These programs offer additional features to help combat spam, such as filtering the emails received by keywords, so that you can make the program automatically remove any email with a chosen keyword, such as “prescriptions”. Email programs also you to right click on the mail, and research the return path so you can verify the send path of a suspect message.

Backing up of email programs is typically easy, and if not done by the push of a button, it can be done by a series of simple steps. Once backed up you can transfer your mailbox and it’s contents to other computers with the same email programs if desired. Typically backing up allows for important documents to be saved on a data device like a CD or DVD, and retrieved with ease. Such backup procedures can allow for proof of communication with an individual or company for a long time frame, years of mail can be backed up and sorted onto a small pile of CD’s, or a few DVD’s. For instructions on how to back up Outlook and Outlook Express please read and follow the steps in this assistance article: Click here to read the article in a new window 

The space limitations of downloadable email is that of the size of your hard disk, so if you have a 80 GB hard disk you can store 80 GB of mail, which is a large amount more space offered than free emails. The amount you are allowed to receive per month is dictated by your Internet Service Provider, and usually capped to a limit of around 2 GB of monthly downloads.

Most of the companies offering POP3, SMTP, IMAP, or other such downloadable email services also have Internet accessible email interfaces commonly known as Webmail. These services allow you to access you email from anywhere, and on any computer in the world as long as it has Internet connection. If you save a copy of important emails on the server, they can also be accessed and viewed through the Webmail interface, within the space limit set by your email provider.

Some tips of safely using your chosen email program are:

If your email program has a Preview Pane, turn it off.

By reading your email with the Preview Pane on, you are automatically opening any email you click on.  Turning it off gives you the choice of opening the email or not.

Beware suspect behaviour and subject lines.

If you receive email from a friend that sounds completely different from what they usually send, it can be some kind of mailing program that has gotten hold of their contact list. Another example of this could be what appears to be your Internet Service Provider, email provider, companies like Paypal, and other such sources sending you emails threatening closure unless you sign into or fill in information on their site. These companies already have your information and would never ask for it or threaten closure in such a way, such mail are scams to get your personal information.

Avoid keeping a contact list.

This is more of an email courtesy, but if you don’t have a contact list then all of these fancy ways of getting to it are useless. At least if your contact list gets hacked, you get a virus, or something else goes wrong you aren’t sharing the headache with everyone on your list.

Save and scan suspects

If you have verified the path and still suspect an email, alternate click on the email and choose “save as” without opening. Save the email to a location, go find it, and run every scan you can on it like virus, spyware, etc. Any email that gives you valid suspicion or reason, throw away and ask the sender about it if it was from a known address.

David Rutledge  is the Owner/Manager  of Dreamlab Digital Design Studio

http://www.dreamlabdigital.com   250-961-0932

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