It’s National Internet Safety Awareness Month – and one of the most common pitfalls we Internet users fall into is accidentally opening a malicious email. It happens to the best of us. Why? We’re swamped – and the scammers targeting our inboxes have gambled on that fact that those inboxes are disorganized.  

Here’s a few things we can do to be less vulnerable and more organized this October and beyond.

Inbox Zero. Inbox zero is the ultimate goal and maybe impossible to achieve by those of us who have never deleted an email in their life. However, it’s a healthy aspiration which guarantees that the only messages within your inbox are new messages. When your inbox is at zero – every message becomes automatically easier to address. Imagine that you make a practice of only checking your emails in the morning. You cut your inbox down to zero every time you go through it – by either archiving or deleting or sorting your emails into folders — you’ll never lose track of anything!

Create Files. This is the best way to keep track of your emails – especially if paired with a clean inbox is to sort everything that comes your way into Files. If you have a Gmail account – it already does this to some extent for you with Inbox, Social, and Promotion tabs. Files, however, are much more specific and personal to you.  They can be created under your settings and applied to any type of email of your choosing: Receipts, Rebecca, Finance, School, anything.

Set Up Different Accounts. You already have a separate work account from your home account – but have you considered creating a subscription account? This would be the email address that you give out whenever you’re asked to sign up for anything online – or in personal. Here’s another idea. If you do all of your banking online, how about a separate online banking account? Having separate accounts will also boost the security of your emails because you’ll be using a different log in and password for each.

Decide to Delete. If you haven’t touched the email in more than 30 days and have no reason to keep an electronic record of it – delete that email. Even if you only delete three or five a day – you’re on your way toward Inbox Zero.

Unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe! Here’s a way to cut down on the influx of emails into your inbox – although it could take forever. Chances are you’ve forgotten have of the websites and companies that you’ve given your email address to. Luckily, Unroll.me is a free online tool which lets you unsubscribe from all of the newsletters you don’t read.

Of course, one newsletter you won’t want to unsubscribe from is Tech Help Boston’s. Want to learn more about how to stay safe online or set up your new Macbook or speed up your home’s Wi-Fi? We’ve go you covered.