Emails are a part of our everyday life, we use them to keep in contact with people all around the world, use them to monitor online shopping and much more.

With an estimated 3.4 billion phishing emails sent per day and accounting for approximately 90 per cent of all data breaches, security of emails is imperative to identifying malicious emails.

Several security measures that can be implemented to increase the chances of a phishing email being spotted are detailed below.

Sender Policy Framework is a way for the recipient of emails to confirm the identity of the sender of the email. This makes it much more challenging to spoof the email address. By Configuring SPF, it will ensure that the emails are coming from the person who sent it.

DomainKey Identified Mail (DKIM) is a protocol that allows a message to be verified through cryptographic authentication (MD5 hash) by the mailbox provider. This is used to confirm that the email address was sent by the individual/person it states it came from.

READ MORE: Get started with your IT policies and procedures

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) allows policies to be applied to emails. For example, in the event that an email does n Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance, pass a SPF or DKIM authentication, this email address will automatically be moved to the spam folder. Additionally, any emails that pass or fail the evaluation will be reported back to the sender.

Spam filters are a program that is used to detect unwanted emails from reaching the users inbox folder.

Common spam filters search for word patterns or frequency. This can often be configured by the individual and should be to an appropriate level to reduce the number of spam emails received.