Do you suspect that your email account is under attack? Do you want to maintain total security of your email account and make it 100% hack proof? Well, Some times our email account might have got hacked and we may not be aware of that. We may believe that our email account is safe, but in reality our private and confidential information may be falling into the hands of a third person.
Here are some signs of unauthorized activity on an email account.
1. Your new emails are marked as Read even if you’ve not read them.
2. Your emails are moved to Trash or even permanently deleted without your notice.
3. Your emails are being forwarded to a third party email address (check your settings->forwarding).
4. Your secondary email address is changed.
If you come across any of the above activities on your email account, then it is a clear indication that your email account is hacked.
Additional Security Features in Gmail to ensure the Safety of your Account
Gmail provides an additional security feature to protect your email account through the means of IP address logging. That is, Gmail records your IP address every time you login to your Gmail account. So, if a third party gets access to your account then even his/her IP is also recorded. To see a list of recorded IP address, scroll down to the bottom of your Gmail account and you’ll see something like this.
Gmail - Last account activity
You can see from the above figure that Gmail shows the IP address of last login (last account activity). You can click on Details to see the IP address of your last 5 activities. If you find that the IP listed in the logs doesn’t belong to you, then you can suspect unauthorized activity.
Steps to be carried out to stop unauthorized activity on your email account
If you feel/suspect that your account is hacked then you must immediately take the actions mentioned below
1. Change your Password
2. Change your security question.
2. Remove any third party email address (if any) to which your account is set to forward emails.
3. Make sure that you can access the email account of your secondary email address.
4. Also change you secondary email password and security question.
This ensures that your account is safe from future attacks.
Showing posts with label email. Show all posts
Showing posts with label email. Show all posts
Monday, January 4, 2010
Thursday, November 19, 2009
How to Protect an Email Account from SPAM
Most of us get SPAM every day. Some of us get more and some little. Even a newly created email account will begin to receive spam just after a few days of it’s creation. Many times we wonder where these spam come from and why? But this question remains unanswered within ourselves. So in this post I will try my best to give every possible information about the spam and will also tell you about how to combat spam.
What is SPAM?
Spam is the abuse of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. Most widely recognized form of spam is email spam.
Where do these SPAM come from?
These spam come only from spammers and never from a legitimate user or a company. These spammers send a single email to hundreds (some times thousands or millions) of email addresses at a time. They either send it manually or use spambots to automate the process of spamming.
Why do spammers SPAM?
The main goal of spammers is to send the spam (unsolicited bulk messages) to as many people as possible in order to make profit. For example, John builds a small website to sell an ebook which gives information about weight loss. In order to make sales he needs publicity for his website. Instead of spending money on advertising, John decides to create an email which contains information about his site along with it’s link and send this email to say 100 email addresses in his contact list. If 1 person out of hundred buy this book john gets $10. What if he sends this email to 1000s of email addresses. He gets $100. Imagine, if he sends this email to 1 Million email addresses he gets $100000.
Now I hope you understood the idea behind spamming. So in order to make money, spammers send their advertising emails to as many people as possible without respecting the recipient’s privacy.
From where do SPAMmers get my email address?
On the Internet there exists many sites who collect the email IDs of people and sell them to spammers in bulk. Most often, people sign up for monthly newsletters and take up surveys. This is the time where these scam sites get their email addresses. Also many spammers collect email addresses by using spambots. These spambots collect email addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists. Such spambots are web crawlers that can gather email addresses from Web sites, newsgroups, forums, special-interest group (SIG) postings, and chat-room conversations.
Spammers also use the trick of creating Hoax Emails for gathering a huge list of email IDs. For example, a spammer sends a hoax email which says “Forward this Message to Help Severely Burned Child”. This email claims that 11 cents will be donated to the child’s family every time the message is sent to others. Most of the people believe this and start forwarding this hoax email to all of the IDs in their contact list. In this way the email spreads rapidly and eventually when it reaches the creator (spammer), the spammer gets a huge list of valid email addresses in the email header. When you get these kind of hoax emails, you can see for yourself in the email header which contains a huge list of email addresses of all those people to whom the email is being forwarded to. This is one of the effective methods used by spammers to gather email addresses.
Is SPAMming legal?
Spamming is completely illegal. Yet it is really difficult to stop spammers from spamming since they keep moving from one hosting company to another after getting banned. This makes it practically impossible to catch spammers and prosecute them.
How to protect my email account from getting SPAMmed?
The following methods can be used to combat email spam.
1. Use spam filters for your email account. If you’re using email services like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc. then spam filters are used by defaut. Each spam filter has it’s algorithm to detect spam emails and will automatically move them to SPAM folder. This keeps your inbox free from spam. However some spam emails become successful to make their way into the inbox by successfully bypassing the filters.
2. Do not post your email address in public forums, user comments and chat-rooms. Give your email address only to trustworthy websites while signing up for newsletters.
3. While taking up online surveys and filling up feedback forms, it is better not to give your personal email address. Instead singup for a dummy email account and use this for surveys and feedback forms.
4. While posting your contact email address on your website use this format: emailaddress [at] yoursite.com instead of emailaddress@yoursite.com. This protects your email address from being indexed by spambots.
5. Do not respond to hoax messages. When you receive a hoax email, avoid forwarding it to your friends. Examples of hoax messages can be found at www.hoax-slayer.com. If you really want to forward it to your friends, make sure that you use “Bcc” (blind certified copy) option to send the email. This will hide all the email IDs to which the mail is forwarded to.
What is SPAM?
Spam is the abuse of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. Most widely recognized form of spam is email spam.
Where do these SPAM come from?
These spam come only from spammers and never from a legitimate user or a company. These spammers send a single email to hundreds (some times thousands or millions) of email addresses at a time. They either send it manually or use spambots to automate the process of spamming.
Why do spammers SPAM?
The main goal of spammers is to send the spam (unsolicited bulk messages) to as many people as possible in order to make profit. For example, John builds a small website to sell an ebook which gives information about weight loss. In order to make sales he needs publicity for his website. Instead of spending money on advertising, John decides to create an email which contains information about his site along with it’s link and send this email to say 100 email addresses in his contact list. If 1 person out of hundred buy this book john gets $10. What if he sends this email to 1000s of email addresses. He gets $100. Imagine, if he sends this email to 1 Million email addresses he gets $100000.
Now I hope you understood the idea behind spamming. So in order to make money, spammers send their advertising emails to as many people as possible without respecting the recipient’s privacy.
From where do SPAMmers get my email address?
On the Internet there exists many sites who collect the email IDs of people and sell them to spammers in bulk. Most often, people sign up for monthly newsletters and take up surveys. This is the time where these scam sites get their email addresses. Also many spammers collect email addresses by using spambots. These spambots collect email addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists. Such spambots are web crawlers that can gather email addresses from Web sites, newsgroups, forums, special-interest group (SIG) postings, and chat-room conversations.
Spammers also use the trick of creating Hoax Emails for gathering a huge list of email IDs. For example, a spammer sends a hoax email which says “Forward this Message to Help Severely Burned Child”. This email claims that 11 cents will be donated to the child’s family every time the message is sent to others. Most of the people believe this and start forwarding this hoax email to all of the IDs in their contact list. In this way the email spreads rapidly and eventually when it reaches the creator (spammer), the spammer gets a huge list of valid email addresses in the email header. When you get these kind of hoax emails, you can see for yourself in the email header which contains a huge list of email addresses of all those people to whom the email is being forwarded to. This is one of the effective methods used by spammers to gather email addresses.
Is SPAMming legal?
Spamming is completely illegal. Yet it is really difficult to stop spammers from spamming since they keep moving from one hosting company to another after getting banned. This makes it practically impossible to catch spammers and prosecute them.
How to protect my email account from getting SPAMmed?
The following methods can be used to combat email spam.
1. Use spam filters for your email account. If you’re using email services like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc. then spam filters are used by defaut. Each spam filter has it’s algorithm to detect spam emails and will automatically move them to SPAM folder. This keeps your inbox free from spam. However some spam emails become successful to make their way into the inbox by successfully bypassing the filters.
2. Do not post your email address in public forums, user comments and chat-rooms. Give your email address only to trustworthy websites while signing up for newsletters.
3. While taking up online surveys and filling up feedback forms, it is better not to give your personal email address. Instead singup for a dummy email account and use this for surveys and feedback forms.
4. While posting your contact email address on your website use this format: emailaddress [at] yoursite.com instead of emailaddress@yoursite.com. This protects your email address from being indexed by spambots.
5. Do not respond to hoax messages. When you receive a hoax email, avoid forwarding it to your friends. Examples of hoax messages can be found at www.hoax-slayer.com. If you really want to forward it to your friends, make sure that you use “Bcc” (blind certified copy) option to send the email. This will hide all the email IDs to which the mail is forwarded to.
Use Gmail Account to Send Emails from Multiple Addresses
In this post you can learn how to use your Gmail account to send and receive emails from multiple addresses. Most of us own more than one email account say for example, one from Gmail, one from Yahoo and one from Hotmail. If you are tired of logging into multiple accounts to check your inbox or to send emails, I have a solution here.
Gmail has an option to integrate multiple email accounts (email addresses) into a single Gmail account. Once you integrate multiple email addresses into your Gmail account, you can use the same account to send emails from different addresses and receive emails for different addresses. Let’s take a simple example
Suppose you have three email addresses (email accounts)
1. hacking@gmail.com
2. hacking@yahoo.com
3. hacker@hotmail.com
You can integrate the emails hacking@yahoo.com and hacker@hotmail.com to hacking@gmail.com and operate all the three accounts from your single gmail account. Here is a step-by-step procedure to do this.
1. Login to your gmail account.
2. Click on Settings at the top right corner.
3. Under Settings, click on Accounts tab.
4. Now you’ll see the first option “Send mail as:“
5. Under this option, click on Add another email address you own
6. Now a small new window will pop-up asking you to enter the details of your new email address.
7. Here you can enter any name and any email address. The email address need not belong to gmail only. You can enter your yahoo, hotmail or any other valid email address.
8. A Verification email will be sent to the address that you specify. Once you verify that you own the email address, it will be integrated to your Gmail account.
Now when you compose a new email, you’ll see an option to select from multiple address to send the mail. Also you’ll receive the incoming mails for multiple addresses to a single mailbox. I hope this will benefit you.
Before you leave, note this, according to Gmail privacy policy, they will not send the user’s IP address in the outgoing emails. That means when you send an email from your Gmail account , the receiver will not be able to find out your IP address. But you don’t have this advantage in Yahoo or other email providers.
Gmail has an option to integrate multiple email accounts (email addresses) into a single Gmail account. Once you integrate multiple email addresses into your Gmail account, you can use the same account to send emails from different addresses and receive emails for different addresses. Let’s take a simple example
Suppose you have three email addresses (email accounts)
1. hacking@gmail.com
2. hacking@yahoo.com
3. hacker@hotmail.com
You can integrate the emails hacking@yahoo.com and hacker@hotmail.com to hacking@gmail.com and operate all the three accounts from your single gmail account. Here is a step-by-step procedure to do this.
1. Login to your gmail account.
2. Click on Settings at the top right corner.
3. Under Settings, click on Accounts tab.
4. Now you’ll see the first option “Send mail as:“
5. Under this option, click on Add another email address you own
6. Now a small new window will pop-up asking you to enter the details of your new email address.
7. Here you can enter any name and any email address. The email address need not belong to gmail only. You can enter your yahoo, hotmail or any other valid email address.
8. A Verification email will be sent to the address that you specify. Once you verify that you own the email address, it will be integrated to your Gmail account.
Now when you compose a new email, you’ll see an option to select from multiple address to send the mail. Also you’ll receive the incoming mails for multiple addresses to a single mailbox. I hope this will benefit you.
Before you leave, note this, according to Gmail privacy policy, they will not send the user’s IP address in the outgoing emails. That means when you send an email from your Gmail account , the receiver will not be able to find out your IP address. But you don’t have this advantage in Yahoo or other email providers.
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