How Secure is Your Email?
I wonder how secure most people think email is, especially when a company emails me my password or login information. There seems to be a lot of people that write things in email that they wouldn't want other people to see, so I want to be clear...
Email Is Not Secure
Not no how, not no way. Even if you connect to your email server over SSL, even if your ISP tells you it's secure and even if you've been sending things for years and haven't had a problem yet, email is not secure.
A lot of people think that email is a lot like regular mail; you put your message in an envelope, address it, hand it to your faithful US Post Office and off it goes through the US mail system, hand delivered to it's destination. If email worked like that, I would consider it secure.
But it doesn't work like that.
Think of email more like a postcard that's not in an envelope. And instead of being sent through the US mail system, you hand it to your neighbor who then continues to hand it down the line until it gets to it's destination. Everyone along the way can read your message and, more importantly, photocopy your message so they can read it later. Everything is right out in the open, including everything you wrote, and anyone can come along in the middle and take a look at the messages as they go by.
It's not exactly like that, but it's darn close. Even if you're careful about your email password and take care not to get your email account hacked, the person you send the email to, or one of the servers in between, might not be so careful.
I'm not saying don't use email, just be aware of what you're sending. You should never send passwords, personal information or anything confidential over email.
This is more of an FYI than anything, but future articles will talk about ways in which you can secure your email by putting it into a virtual envelope. The hard part here is getting everyone you send email to to do the same. Subscribe to the feed so you don't miss those posts.
Related posts:
- How Secure is WiFi? WiFi has had a rough security past. The 802.11a, the...
- Living the Life Electric Part 2: Using Email I am assuming in Part 2 that you have already...
- Living the Life Electric Part 1: The Email I've been thinking lately about the concept of living an...
