Aura’s Email Protection: Help keep your inbox safe and scam-free

Email protection scans incoming emails for signs of scams, spam, and other threats. Suspicious and dangerous emails are quarantined with warnings sent to users to prevent them from clicking on malicious links or providing sensitive information. 

In 2024, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reported that 25% of all reported frauds originated from an email, with Americans losing over $500 million to email scams. 

Aura takes a two-pronged approach when determining whether or not an email is dangerous: 

1. Email reputation scan. Aura’s spam filtering first checks the sender’s reputation to determine whether an email is likely to be safe or potentially dangerous. This can include unfamiliar or spoofed email addresses or senders impersonating known brands or contacts. 
2. Full text scan. If an email appears dangerous, Aura then performs a deeper scan of the message content to look for signs of a scam. This can include urgent or threatening language, requests for sensitive information, unexpected attachments or links, or poor grammar or unusual formatting. 

Aura’s Email Protection is available on Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, and Yahoo email accounts and works across web, iOS, and Android apps. Support for AOL is coming soon. 

Once linked to an account, Aura will scan emails from the past 30 days or up to 10,000 emails, as well as all new incoming emails.

Aura is designed to help individuals protect their inbox from phishing attacks and other cyber threats. 

Aura’s Email Protection is available for all adult members on Individual, Couple, and Family plans. 

Both new and current Aura members can add Email Protection to their plan by calling our team at 517-940-8147.

Alternatively, you can add Email Protection to your account by visiting your account Membership Center:

• Open the Aura app or sign in to the Aura web dashboard
• Navigate to Me
• Select Email Protection
• Click Add+
• Choose Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo
• Sign in to your email account and select Allow to grant access (Note: Aura uses secure login flows provided by your email service)

For new members: Add Email Protection to your 14-day free trial at no extra cost. After your free trial ends, you’ll be charged your plan’s base rate plus the cost of any add-ons (such as Email Protection).

• Phishing attempts. Scammers impersonate known companies, trusted authority figures, or even friends and family in an attempt to get you to click on malicious links or provide sensitive information. There are many different types of phishing attacks, such as spear phishing (highly targeted attacks) and whaling (targeting high-profile individuals, such as CEOs). 
• AI-powered scam emails. Fraudsters use generative AI tools to scrape data from social media and data breaches to create highly-personalized and convincing scam messages. 
• Business Email Compromise (BEC). Fraudsters target business email accounts to gain access to sensitive data, leading to data breaches, data loss, and ransomware attacks. 
• Malware and malicious emails. Cybercriminals disguise malware, such as ransomware and other viruses, in links, attachments, and QR codes.
• Social engineering attacks. Many email attacks rely on psychological manipulation techniques, such as impersonation, using urgency or fear, or pretexting, to trick users into complying with their demands. 
• Thread hijacking. Scammers infiltrate legitimate email threads to hide their malicious messages and links in ongoing conversations. 
• Calendar invite and file sharing fraud. Threat actors send malicious links disguised as calendar invites or links to trusted services, such as SharePoint, OneDrive, or DocuSign, which bypass many email gateways. 

Aura’s email aliases allow you to create unique email addresses that forward messages to your real inbox, without revealing your actual email address. For example, when you sign up for a newsletter or provide an online store with your email in exchange for a discount code. 

Here’s how Aura’s email aliases work: 

• Open the Aura browser extension when asked to enter your email address
• Select the “+” button in the password section
• Aura generates a random email address and password for you that can be saved in Aura’s password manager
• Enable message forwarding to receive emails sent to your email alias in your inbox
• Aura’s Email Protection will continue to scan all forwarded emails for red flags

Email aliases help keep your true email address private and can also reduce spam and lower the risk of data exposure. 

Email protection and email security tools are two separate, yet similar, approaches to protecting email communications. 

Here are the main differences: 

• Email protection scans incoming emails and filters out email-based threats, such as phishing attacks, dangerous links and attachments, and spam. Everyone can benefit from the safety that email protection provides. 
• Email security are tools that help keep your inbox secure against hackers and other threats, such as email encryption and authentication tools.