Secrets To Secure Email!
Posted on August 13, 2008
Filed Under Computers & Internet |
Is there such a thing as “Secure Email”?We can break it down into two main parts.First, as any of you that have been online for awhile as I have, over eight years this month, you have no doubt shared your email address with other people on the Internet.
Every single time you send an email message to anyone, your email address is made available tothat person. Otherwise, how else can they reply to your email message?Unless, of course, you are a spammer using stealth email software to hide your identity and real email address and domain of origin of your messages.That is a whole different type of problem.And how many times have you been requested to enter your email address at a web site?Once you press submit, there is no way of really knowing who will end up with your email address and how it is that they plan to use it.
No matter what the web site’s “Privacy Policy”might state, you can never be certain how theywill use your email address information.The fact that I have used the same email address for so many years and use it on my web site as a way for people to contact me, means that my address exists on every Spam disk or CD that is currently for sale on the Internet.We are all vulnerable to this sort of abuse. But there is indeed such a thing as “Secure Email”.One of the best ways to control spam is to make use of the FREE email forwarding service known as Spam Gourmet.Visit this FREE service Spam Gourmet, after you save and confirm the email address where you’d like to receive messages, you can give out self-destructing disposable email addresses whenever you want as follows:
where someword is a word you haven’t used before, x is the numberof email messages you want to receive at the address (up to 20),and user is your username.If you receive more than 20 emails to that address from the same sender, their email gets tossed into the trash automatically.This gives you a chance to establish real email contacts from people you want to correspond with and then transfer them to your real email address while eliminating all spam.
But, having a “Secure Email Address” is just one aspectof secure email.The other part of “Secure Email” that is really important is the ability to be able to send someone an email message without the fear that what you have written in the message will be exposed to unauthorized people.For most of us, we could care less if what we write in an email message manages to end up getting posted on a web site.For those of us wishing to conduct business online, that might turn out to be a blessing in the form of free advertising.
But how many times have you been warned NEVER to send your credit card number and expiration date to a vendor via email?The reason for that warning is simple; email messages can be read by anyone with access to a computer that is acting as a server.Since your email message, and that of everyone else, must pass from one server to another to finally reach the intended recipient, that message can be intercepted at any of those servers through which it must pass.Your personal message to a loved one can become a public document on the Internet thus exposing your inner most feelings and intimate thoughts.
Emailing a co-worker about sensitive business informationcan fall into the hands of someone friendly with your competition.Those sales projections or notes on a new client could easily be turned against you.That would be truly unfortunate since the technology already exists for making your email messages secure.The best solution is that of email encryption.There are many email encryption options which are availableto the average Internet user and many of these options areFREE to use. Not bad for getting that James Bondish feeling.Perhaps the best of these options is a software programcalled Pretty Good Privacy, PGP. It is free to use and todistribute and has been around longer than I have beenon the Internet, since 1991.
“PGP® or Pretty Good Privacy® is a powerful cryptographicproduct family that enables people to securely exchangemessages, and to secure files, disk volumes and networkconnections with both privacy and strong authentication.”PGP is Freeware.
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