Do Not Use Your Email for Storage

In this video, we’re going to go over why you shouldn’t use your email for storage. Now we tend to store a lot of different things in our email– banking information, photos, communications with other people, and whatnot. And this is a typical mailbox. This is a mock up of one of mine, some is real, some is fake. But I want to leave some in here, that way we can go over it. So what can we tell about, just from looking at this, we don’t even have to open the emails. Well I could see there’s a Twitter account and I can see the account name on there. I can see that I have a LastPass account and a DHash account.

I could also see I have a SANS Institute account, Hunchly account, I have another Proton email account, and also I could see banking information and a pay stub. So who would be interested in this type of information? Well malicious hackers and other criminals would love to get in your mailbox and find that type of information. Things like if I find your pay stub, I’m probably going to get your address. I’m going to probably get some other critical information about you. And I might be able to either take the money or create another credit card under your name based on the information there and other information I find online.

So let’s take a look at how we could actually take care of this problem. So there’s a couple of different ways that we can actually do this. And the first one we’re going to take a look at is you could open up an email, and then if you go to the print function– and you can do this on a Windows computer, by default Windows 8, Windows 10. If you open the email, go to Print and then we could choose Microsoft Print to PDF. And it’s going to export it as a PDF file. That way we could put on an external drive or a hard drive or what not. The other option we could do is Google Takeout.

If you have a Google account, it’s takeout.google.com. And the important thing here is, you want to just scroll down and you want to find Mail. And you want to make sure that Mail is checked. And you want to do All Mail Data Included. And we grab all the attachments and whatnot. When you scroll to the bottom, you go Next Step. And then you could choose how often you’re going to export it. And the final type and the file size. And then you create the export. And depending on which files you have in there, is going to depend on how long it’s going to take. So in wrapping up, export your email.

Export any important email and save it to a secure driver folder. And you also want to make sure that you’re only keeping in your mailbox what you don’t care gets exposed. In other words, if you don’t care if a complete stranger gets a hold of the information in your email, and you do need to think about whether it’s going to be important or not to secure it. You want to make sure it’s only email that you don’t care if everyone else is able to read it. And export to PDF or Gmail export. Saving your email is pretty simple. You can print to PDF. Again, Windows 8 and 10 has built-in feature.

OS X and Linux– there’s a lot of free PDF programmes you could download and use those also. Or if you’re using Google, you could do Google Takeout. So this was about securing your email. In the next video, we’re going to learn how to identify and find phishing emails. Thank you for watching. I’ll see you in the next video.