Monday, March 27, 2017

EMAIL SPECIAL.... Best add-ons for protecting your email account

Best add-ons for protecting your email account


These can protect you from phishing attacks and keep anyone from peeping at what you send through your email

There's no doubt Google runs a tight ship as far as secu rity goes. If you are hacked using Google services it's usually (but not always) because of something you did, not Google. If you want to keep your emails on Google's services more secure, you'll need to do more than just enable two-factor authentication. You need to practise safe browsing, steering clear of sites and emails that could steal your info. Here are five third-party add-ons you can plug into Gmail to help you navigate the internet a little more safely.

SecureGmail
Probably the best name for an add-on desig ned to improve Gmail security. There is no doubt SecureGmail is useful for the privacy-conscious. It encrypts and decrypts all the emails you send and receive in Gmail, before they ever reach Google's servers, so you know that if anyone else should try and extract the contents they won't be able to do so, including Google itself.
At the other end the recipient of your email needs a specified password to understand and de code the message, but you don't have to apply this encryption to everything you send through Gmail, so you can save it just for the most sensitive stuff.
Ugly Email
There are plenty of emailers out there who'd like to know when and where you open your messages so they apply a tracker to notify them when you have opened it. If you're not into that kind of tracking behaviour, then there's Ugly Email -add the extension to Chrome and you get a simple eye icon inside your Gmail account on the web if an email contains some kind of tracker. This add-on is for informative purposes only, so you can't do anything about the tracking except choose not to open the offending message.

Gmail Sender Icons
Gmail Sender Icons is a Chrome extension that puts favicon symbols next to senders in Gmail, so you can quickly visualise which domain each message is coming from. It gives you that same ata-glance ease-of-use that you get when looking through the open tabs in your browser, but built right into your Gmail inbox, with virtually no slowdown in speed. It's a way of flagging spam emails that aren't from respectable sources, and you can spot the potentially dodgy messages before you open them.

Web of Trust
Gmail (and Google) already does a decent job of warning you about phishing links and sites.But there's no harm in bolstering your protection further, and WoT (Web of Trust) is one of the best ways to do it. It rates websites from a scale of one to five for how safe the site is. This means you can instantly know if a link you click on in Gmail is real or a phishing scam. Ratings are provided by a user community of more than 140 million people, but WoT also uses third-party information and algorithms useful for less trafficked sites.

Password Alert
This one is from Google itself: A Chrome extension that helps keep you safe against any phishing attempts that may wander into your inbox. It watches out for Google sign-in pages that aren't actually Google sign-in pages. Should you get duped into entering your account password, you'll then get an instant warning asking you to reset it to something else. The extension works by storing a `thumbnail' of your password for comparison purposes, rather than the password itself.

gizmodo.in

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