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Password protect your mailbox

More ways to protect your email

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Windows user accounts are the best way to protect your email on a shared computer. But if you want additional protection, there are two more things you can do. First, you can require a logon to access your Exchange email. Second, you can add a password to help protect your data files.

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Windows user accounts are the best way to protect your email on a shared computer.

But if you want additional protection, there are two more things you can do.

First, you can require a logon to access your Exchange email.

In Outlook, click FILE, click Info, and then in Account Settings, click Account Settings.

On the E-mail tab, select your email account. This method will only work if the Account Type is Microsoft Exchange.

Click Change, click More Settings. Then, on the Security tab, select Always prompt for logon credentials.

Click OK, Next, and Finish.

Now, whenever you open Outlook, you are prompted to enter your password.

So why would you want to make it more difficult for yourself by having to enter a password?

Well, maybe you are located in an area where lots of people can easily access your computer, and you just want a little more protection.

For the same reason, you can also add a password to help protect your data files.

Ordinarily, you save email, calendar items and contacts to your email server. But there are times when you may need to save items to a data file on your computer, such as when you run out of online storage space.

Let's say we have a data file that contains email from an old account.

We won't go into how to import and export data files in this course.

To add a password, right-click the data file in the folder list, and click Data File Properties.

Then, click Advanced and Change Password. Since we are adding a password for the first time, leave Old password blank.

Type the password you want to add in New password and then, type it again.

Don't select Save this password in your password list and click OK.

To see how the password works, close Outlook. Then, reopen it.

Enter a password for the data file and click OK.

If you don’t enter a password and click Cancel, Outlook opens, but you cannot access the data file.

One important thing: The password is saved on your computer and you won't be able to retrieve it from your email provider, if you forget it.

And without the password, you won't be able to get into your data file. So use a password that you are not going to forget.

In this course, you learned about many of the options available to you for protecting your email with a password.

For protecting individual email, you can use Digital Rights Management.

For more information about that and other options, check out the links in the course summary.

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