Simple Things That YOU Can Do to Protect Your Emails

What you can do to help make your and everyone else’s email more secure. The big companies that offer consumer email accounts (Yahoo Email, Google Gmail, and Outlook) provide easy ways for you to report bad email behavior like spamming, phishing, and spreading hoax emails.

Yahoo Email makes it easy

If you have a Yahoo email account, in addition to reporting the receipt of spam in your inbox, you can now also report phishing attempts easily without having to go to a different site or do anything more than pulling down the “Spam” drop down menu that appears above every email and selecting “Report a Phishing Scam.”

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Of course, there is an assumption here that you are able to identify a phishing email before falling victim. If you don’t want to be tricked into giving up your personal information that can be used to hack your accounts and steal your money, please educate yourself by watching this Yahoo-produced videoon YouTube. In no time, you’ll be able to start identifying and flagging phishing attempts. The key is to always be suspicious, even if an email is from someone you know.

If you have security software like Net Protector Antivirus, it will identify and block dangerous links that appear in email messages, no matter who sent it to you.

Reporting a phishing scam

Once you select “Report a Phishing Scam” the email disappears from you inbox and goes directly into your “Spam” folder. Yahoo personnel will be alerted and take it from there. The more email users who report phishing and spam emails, the better able Yahoo will be to filter out these offending messages and prevent these nasty schemes from blossoming.

Please take a couple of seconds to report spam and phishing attempts. Consider it an Internet public service and your duty to protect yourself and others. So why not be a bit of a hero without doing anything heroic. Yahoo says on its Help page: “Every time you mark an email as spam in Yahoo Mail, you give us even more ammunition to combat unsolicited messages.”

Google Gmail and Outlook make reporting spam easy too

Google’s Gmail also has an option to report spam easily. Just click on the exclamation mark in the menu bar above the message and it will be reported to Google as spam.

Outlook also gives you the option to easily mark an email that comes into your inbox as junk. For all the details on the Outlook 2010 junk email filter and more, visit this Microsoft support page.

As always, we recommend you employ a strong security suite from a major security software vendor like Net Protector Antivirus. Get Net Protector Antivirus, which blocks dangerous websites and identifies dangerous links in websites, social networks, email, and instant messages.