How Private is Your Email

How Private is Your Email?

Email has become important for work and personal communications and sending/receiving email has become an everyday occurrence for most of us. However many are very unaware how insecure it is.

Sending a message by email is basically as private as sending a postcard. Email messages have to go through many other computers before reaching their destination and at each computer a copy of the message is made before forwarding the message on.

Although the copies are normally only temporary they don't have to be.
Normally a copy is retained on the sending computer and also the receiving computer and these copies are generally stored unprotected.

You can protect you email by using encryption but this is very seldom done because spam and virus checkers can't work on encrypted email. You are therefore faced with the choice of virus/spam checking or encryption not both.

If you share a computer with someone then your email privacy is even more compromised. Many families share a computer using a single logon ID. This is not the most private/secure solution.

The best way to share a computer is to have separate logon accounts for each user and to use NTFS file system (Windows 2000 and above).

Other Dangers

If you are working in an office environment especially a medium to large one you can almost guarantee that your email is being monitored. For small organisations and home users this is also possible but less likely.

If your computer is insecure then so is your email. The most rudimentary form of security is a logon prompt. Most home and small office users have auto logon enabled. This not only allows anyone to switch on an use your computer and its data but also to install other software on it.

Always use a standard logon procedure and not auto logon.

It is fair to say that no system is completely secure but there are small simple procedures that can help increase security.

However email and email systems are not secure by default, and I would advise the use of email for very confidential transactions unless you have additional protection.

Related Articles and Resources

Why You Should Keep Your Email Account Details Private

--------------------------------------------------------------------