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How to Make Your Webmail Secure

You can simply understand Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo’s Webmail services. They offer their users with huge storage space of gigabytes and you can access it from anywhere even from your smartphones. Nowadays everybody makes use of this service. So you should have faith that it’s secure because it stores your personal emails on their distant servers and due to this you can access your accounts at any time from anywhere. In September there was headline that Yahoo Mail box of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was being hacked. Users of Web-mail need to be more careful about cyber security.

Picking A Password

The first step to protect yourself from hackers is that you have to choose password carefully. One tip for choosing password is that avoid such words that come in dictionary. One hacking technique is that they use such programs which try different combination of letters from dictionary as a plausible password. So it’s always preferred that you choose password having combination of letters, numbers and symbols. Don’t ever use same passwords for email and other programs as it’s little difficult for you to memorize different passwords. If you do so, disadvantage will be that if one of your accounts gets hacked others will also be, and it won’t good for you. So for your own convenience try to choose such passwords whose first few letters are same or can have service name or some specific numbers; in this way it would be easier for you to memorize.

Securing Your Questions

While security questions are not apparent as before, for example people use to select the question what’s your mother’s middle name? What is the name of your favorite book? And it can be cracked so easily by anyone having good guesses. Because you may have mentioned your favorite book’s name in your Facebook’s profile or in your orkut profile. And if you are a high-profile personality and you have entered each and every thing in your profile than any hacker could easily crack your account or could be found by googling. So it’s always preferred that never ever answers the secret question’s truthfully. And if it gives you option to enter your own security question so choose such question which is not obvious or can’t be found in your public profile.

Raising the Security Level

Gmail have relatively best security from the three most popular Web mail services. Because it’s giving encryption for all the mails called Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. So due to this encryption, it’s little difficult for hackers and snoopers to hack gmail accounts. To change it you have to click on setting at the top of your Gmail page. Then scroll down in the General tab to “Browser Connection” and select “Always use https” else you can type URL (https*//www.gmail.com) > [type: in place of *] in address bar of your browser to get a safe version of the website.

Https encryption is also being offered by Hotmail and Yahoo mail, but they provide it only for the log-in page, and your actual messages are silent susceptible. This is always turned on in Yahoo Mail, while in hotmail you can turn it on just by clicking the “Use Enhanced Security”, this button is below where you entered your password. You can be logged in for long period of time at your Web-mail service after being quit from the browser do click log-out. To make sure you logged out of your account browse back to your Web-mail login page. Some browsers provide you the facility to memorize your password and will direct you automatically to your mailbox when mail button is pressed and it would be better if you are using your own personal system.