Email Encryption Basics: 3 Common Encrypting Methods

With today's high security risks come elevated levels of surveillance. Most people believe their email to be secure and private but nothing could be further from the truth. There are multiple chances for anyone with the right software and access to read your email on its way to the recipient. Because of this it is necessary, to be secure, to use email encryption. It is a simple solution and one worth looking into to protect your privacy and security, especially if you tend to send a lot of business emails containing confidential information. There are three main strategies in employing encrypted email and it largely depends on the email client you are using.

The first is to use a free online encrypted email service such as Hushmail. Their website is www.hushmail.com . This website offers free email accounts that will automatically encrypt your email. According to their website, hushmail uses the latest open PGP (Pretty Good Protection) standard. Although PGP has been around for decades, it's encryption has never been broken. The only requirement is that you will need a pair of keys to lock and unlock email. This can be cumbersome if your friends and family are not computer savvy. You must give them what is called a "public" key to use for sending email. This is a unique key, but can be given out to anyone from whom you want to receive encrypted email messages. The public key is what locks the message and encrypts it into unreadable letter, numbers, and characters. The message can only be unlocked with your "private" key. This key is not to be given out, for it is the private key that makes the encrypted email readable only to you. Hushmail serves to simplify the process with their web-based access. For a fee, you can also use hushmail through your independent email client or for use for sending/receiving email from websites.

The other use of PGP is through a standalone program that will add-on the encryption service to your existing client. The best example of this is using Mozilla's Thunderbird free open-source client. With Thunderbird, you can easily add-on the Enigmail extension. One good source of how to do this is explained in detail at the following website: http://lifehacker.com/software/encryption/how-to-encrypt-your-email-180878.php .

The third method, and one of the most popular is to use the encryption service provided already installed in Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. This can be activated in the options. It will require you to share certificates with those whom you want to send/receive encrypted mail. This is done easily enough by simply sending them a digitally signed email. As a default, Outlook uses an encryption algorithm known as 3DES. It is slower than PGP encryption, but very secure in that it goes through the algorithm three times in encrypting the message. See the Microsoft website for Outlook or use your Outlook help button to learn more about it.

Encryption, although difficult to implement with some because of the 2-way key requirement is almost mandatory for sending/receiving secure email. Who knows how many other people may be reading what you intended as a private message? It's time to do something about it.