If you worry about secure email between you and your friends then you should be using email encryption when you are sending emails. Besides using encryption for your emails you should also have an encrypted folder on your hard drive where all of your private information is kept.
Certainly you are right to worry about your emails being read by nefarious people with a thieving agenda but the same is true of your hard drive. Sending your social security number, pin, credit card number, bank account numbers or any other ultra private information over email is not a good idea unless you do encrypt it. However if that same info on your hard drive isn’t encrypted you stand a good chance of having it stolen whether you are using secure email or not. Email encryption can cut down on identity theft and theft of ultra private info but that’s only a part of the problem.
The biggest reason a more people don’t use encrypted email to secure their info is because the person you are sending to also needs the key to be able to unencrypt the email. They see it as to big a hassle to use for both them and the people they are emailing. That’s to bad because when they become victims of identity theft they are going to wish the had kept their email and hard drive more secure.
Email Encryption
If you are doing business online you should be using email encryption when communicating with your customers. They will more than likely appreciate the fact that you are concerned about their privacy.
Email encryption is pretty easy to do. You simply have two keys, one private and one public. When you do the email encryption it can only be decry[ted and read by the person or people with the private encryption key. So if you want others to be able to send you secure email you give them your public key and you keep your private key a secret. Then only you can read the message in the encrypted email. You can put your public key anywhere and not have to worry about the security of your emails.
Now if you want to communicate with a friend or reply to a secure message you’ll need the public key for the person you are sending the email to. This may sound like a lot of work but some of the email programs make it very easy to do. They exchange public keys automatically and you don’t have to do a thing. It makes using secure email much easier.
Secure Email
About the best available secure encryption program around is PGP. It’s as good as military grade encryption as far as I’m concerned. Fact is a lot of people say it’s unbreakable and so far they’ve been right. Besides protecting the important data in your emails you can also use PGP to protect all the data on your hard drive with encryption.
There are new versions of PGP released now and then and it’s a good idea to always use the latest version. As PGP is considered unbreakable you need to be sure your PC is secure at all times and no one has installed a trojan horse or key logging software on the PC as this will give them your private key and then nothing you send will be secure even though it’s encryption is in place.
How secure is PGP? Well, the govt isn’t really happy because govt departments say it’s right next to impossible to decrypt anything that was encrypted by PGP. By next to impossible they meant they couldn’t do it unless a judge could force a person to give up their private key.
There are some rights issues about self incrimination and other things that make it hard for the govt to force anyone to give up a private key. Neither British investigators or the FBI have been able to break PGP encryption so that’s secure enough for my email.
More and more things are coming online and encryption is going to become standard for a lot of sites. Learning how to use email encryption so you have secure email now will help you in the future and keep all your emails safe now. Learn to use email encryption now and also secure your HD with a secure encryption and you should be safe for a long time to come.