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Friday, July 25, 2025

Tech­nol­o­gy Mat­ters

Defending the inbox

5 tips for se­cur­ing your per­son­al, busi­ness e-mail com­mu­ni­ca­tions

by

20140626

In spite of the rise of so­cial me­dia and in­stant mes­sag­ing, e-mail re­mains one of the most dom­i­nant com­mu­ni­ca­tions and file trans­port tools used in busi­ness to­day. It is easy to use, and most users have a high lev­el of con­fi­dence that their e-mail will be de­liv­ered safe­ly to in­tend­ed re­cip­i­ents. But this per­cep­tion does not al­ways line up with re­al­i­ty. Even as e-mail us­age is ex­pect­ed to grow to over 4.3 bil­lion ac­counts by 2016, it is still based on a rel­a­tive­ly an­ti­quat­ed set of pro­to­cols. As us­age grows, so do the threats that con­fi­den­tial in­for­ma­tion can be com­pro­mised. In the dig­i­tal age can da­ta com­pro­mise can come at a hefty fi­nan­cial and rep­u­ta­tion­al price.

How e-mail works

E-mail is of­ten likened to postal mail. We write our mes­sages, dis­patch them and they are de­liv­ered to their des­ti­na­tion ad­dress. We can send copies to third par­ties and save a copy for our records. To un­der­stand e-mail pri­va­cy, though, there is an im­por­tant dif­fer­ence to keep in mind.

Un­like a let­ter that is phys­i­cal­ly car­ried phys­i­cal­ly from post box to post of­fice, to post of­fice to mail slot, an e-mail mes­sage is rout­ed over the In­ter­net by be­ing copied from serv­er to serv­er un­til it reach­es its des­ti­na­tion mail­box. Most sig­nif­i­cant­ly, un­less an e-mail is en­crypt­ed, these copies are trans­mit­ted in plain­ly leg­i­ble text.

In­her­ent risks

This rais­es two im­por­tant con­sid­er­a­tions. First, on its way to its even­tu­al des­ti­na­tion, copies of your e-mail might end up in a num­ber of places on the In­ter­net, pos­si­bly in­clud­ing servers mon­i­tored by hack­ers or in­tel­li­gence ser­vices. Sec­ond, though un­like­ly for most peo­ple, it not re­al­ly pos­si­ble to ver­i­fy the in­tegri­ty of e-mail you send and re­ceive un­less it is en­crypt­ed. This means that an e-mail you re­ceive from an ad­dress you know, may have been mod­i­fied along the way or forged al­to­geth­er. Most users will not be able to dis­cern the dif­fer­ence.

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