I recently read of a lady in the US who was selling her house in Australia. She made the mistake of sending some information via email and she lost a lot of money. She didn’t know that scammers had intercepted her emails to the legitimate firm with which she was dealing. (Click on the button at the end of this post to read the whole story.)

Email is a great way to communicate but, unfortunately, most of us haven’t been taught the seriousness of using it. For instance, often when I have to help customers with their email account and I ask for their email password, it’s a password which could be hacked in minutes or maybe hours. We computer users tend to make our email password something easy – something we won’t readily forget. That way of thinking is just the opposite of what we should be doing. Your email password should be a secure password. For me, my email password is my second strongest password. The only password stronger is the one protecting my password manager.

People often tell me, “I don’t have anything important in my email. It wouldn’t matter if someone did break in.” My one-word response to that comment is “Wrong!” You would be shocked to find out what hackers can discover about you once they get into your email.

Another email area in which our training is usually pretty lax is that regarding encryption. Standard email is not encrypted. That means that anyone who can intercept your email, from the time you send it until it arrives in the recipient’s Inbox, can read what you wrote and see what attachments you’ve sent. All the well-known email providers use un-encrypted email. To get secure email, you generally have to pay for an encryption email service. But, even if you do that, the other people you send to would also have to have the service to keep your emails fully secure.

Finally, we often are too quick to open an email or an email attachment or click on a link before we think things through. At our live seminars, I often have those attending look at five or six emails and try to determine whether the emails are real or fake.

It’s time to take emails seriously. Don’t just fluff off the importance of keeping your email (and contacts, for that matter) secure from hackers.