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Despite the ongoing battle to limit Internet freedom, the U.S. Senate’s proposed amendment to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act is aimed at doing exactly the opposite. If the bill is passed, it will prevent the cops from snooping through your e-mail, chat logs and cloud files. No doubt you care about protecting your information and you are definitely not going to wait for the Senate to take action, are you? Well, here are some nifty tricks to ensure your email hosting platform remains secure from prying eyes.

A secure e-mail password is no doubt one of those things that have been thrown in your face for the last couple of years. If you find crafting a difficult to crack password daunting or at least difficult to remember, try using a password derived from an obvious sentence. For example, “My dog Earnest likes jumping on visitors!” Then turn this into an acronym and add a number to come up with “MdEljonv!15.” This will roll off your fingertips, yet will be quite impenetrable to anyone else.

E-mail encryption is another practical way of ensuring your e-mails are locked and secure even when someone who shouldn’t be is trying to access your connection. If you don’t use Gmail, ensure that your email hosting company uses a public key cryptography which encodes all your incoming and outgoing emails. Companies like SherWeb extend this encryption and offer solutions that allow archiving of secure messages to any third-party archive solution and remain fully compliant with HIPAA, SOX, GLBA and PCI (News - Alert) DSS mandaes. If you are looking for the most secure e-mail encryption, you are definitely better off leveraging this option.

While email hosting companies like Google (News - Alert) offer very secure and reliable e-mail services, they are known to collect your browsing patterns across the Web. Other services however like Tor, originally developed with the U.S. Navy in mind, avoid cross-website tracking and block traffic analysis which then blocks a message’s source, affiliation and other characteristics.

Lastly, always use the verification process and the https option provided by your email hosting company when accessing your confidential messages. Gmail does a good job of enforcing these security measures and third-party email hosting Exchange services like those from SherWeb also ensure users remain fully protected at all times.  

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO Miami 2013, Jan 29- Feb. 1 in Miami, Florida.  Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO (News - Alert). Follow us on Twitter.