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"Secrets To Secure Email!"
by A.T. Rendon
All Rights Reserved
© Copyright 2002
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 a
while 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 to
that 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 they
will 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 at:
http://www.spamgourmet.com
With 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:
someword.x.user@spamgourmet.com
where someword is a word you haven't used before, x is the
number of 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 aspect
of 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 information
can 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 available
to the average Internet user and many of these options are
FREE to use. Not bad for getting that James Bondish feeling.
Perhaps the best of these options is a software program
called Pretty Good Privacy, PGP. It is free to use and to
distribute and has been around longer than I have been
on the Internet, since 1991.
"PGP® or Pretty Good Privacy® is a powerful cryptographic
product family that enables people to securely exchange
messages, and to secure files, disk volumes and network
connections with both privacy and strong authentication."
PGP is Freeware.
Download your FREE copy of this software at:
http://www.pgpi.org/
Another solution is the Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail
Extensions, S/MIME protocol, an industry standard supported
by almost all of the latest email programs and web browsers,
including Microsoft and Netscape.
S/MIME incorporates Digital Certificates, which authenticate
the identity of an emails sender and receiver, verify the
integrity of a message and ensures the privacy of the content.
It only takes a few minutes to get a Digital Certificate in order to secure your email. However, it does cost $ 14.95 per
year to maintain the certificate. You can try it for 60 days
FREE at:
We managed to find several, completely "FREE Secure Email
Services", that we have compiled in a list via Auto-Responder
at: mailto:secure_email@emailexchange.org
Another excellent FREE source of Privacy info is The Electronic
Privacy Information Center, EPIC. They offer an online guide
that shows users how to get PGP and other encryption programs
as well as how to surf anonymously and dealing with cookies.
The EPIC guide also shows users how to download PGP via email:
You just send a request to mailto:ftp-request@netcom.com
with the Subject line "SEND mpj/getpgp.asc."
You can access their FREE Resources at:
http://www.epic.org/privacy/tools.html
Most of us can not see the need for secure email.
But it is important to consider in this day and age
where your email can be read by unintended people
and it is certainly a cure for identity theft which can
harm your peace of mind and also your pocket book.
_________________________________________________________
A.T.Rendon is an entrepreneur and published writer.
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