There’s no undoing an email (with limited exceptions if you’re in an Microsoft Exchange environment). Plus, email security is not as strong as you might expect, especially if you aren’t using email encryption. For these reasons, never give out your sensitive data in an email.

Email attachments are ubiquitous, but risky – you never know what they might include. It’s usually safer to share content via links to cloud services, since you’re not actually downloading anything onto your system.

All major consumer email services offer filtering options, with which you can choose what happens to any message that’s from a specific sender and/or contains a particular subject line or words. For example, you can immediately archive any email with “deal” or “unsubscribe” in its body. This can help you weed out risky messages without […]

Email is based on an old set of protocols with few privacy protections. Don’t send your most sensitive information (like your Social Security number) over email if possible. Use encrypted chat or a voice call instead.

Typing in a few letters in the “to:” field of an email often results in your email service/client suggesting an autocompletion. This is a handy feature, but one that can backfire. For instance, it might result in you inadvertently sending sensitive data to someone who shouldn’t have it.

The “Nigerian prince” scheme is one of the best-known email scams, but it’s hardly the only one. Others to look out for include messages purporting to be from government agencies (which pretty much never communicate with individuals this way) and communications from ISPS and software vendors, if they claim to include software patches/updates that would […]