Did you know that an email, unless it was encrypted, is sent in plain text? If someone (or more probably something) sniffs the network traffic where your email goes through, it can be read without any hassle.
Here’s the quick and simplified version of the path an email takes :
- Sender device (computer, mobile, tablet, etc.)
- Internal network (router, office servers, etc.)
- Internet or Telephone service provider (your mobile network)
- Email service provider
- Recipient internal network
- Recipient device
Anywhere along that road, an ill-intentioned person or malware can attempt to retrieve important information in your email communications.
Obviously, if you are sending your grocery list to your partner, there is no real concern. But if you are sending a password or personal data, that’s where your email becomes very interesting.
If you are sending a postcard to your friend, the content will obviously be light and it wouldn’t matter if anyone read the message. If you are sending a cheque or any type of private information that you wouldn’t want anyone to see, you would use one of the post office’s secure mailing envelopes, for example.
So why would we send confidential information through email without any form of security?
Encrypting your messages
Simply put, encrypting data is scrambling the content through complex mathematical transformations. You can use an encryption tool like PGP, which is now relatively accessible to everyone. Should you only secure the email that contains your credit card number? No. If an attacker intercepts all your email traffic and sees only one encrypted message, it’ll be quite easy to identify and pretty much asking to be hacked. Your solution: use a secure protocol for all messages sent.
But encrypting each individual message is rather exhausting. You need the public key of every contact with whom you are establishing a secure communication. The same situation applies to the contacts that wish to send you an encrypted message too. Saving all those keys for everyone you communicate with is quite painful for regular communications.
Even if you have a rock solid protocol that secures your messages, only the content will be scrambled. The information located in the email header (such as sender and recipient emails, subject, date, network, etc.) and attachments are not secured.
Encrypting the connection
Good news! You can also encrypt the email message transfer. This encryption is made on the server during the transfer and prevents disclosing the message content even if it’s intercepted. Most internet service providers and hosting providers (like Funio) provide a secured network connection with TLS (better known as SSL).
However, when the message has reached the email provider, anything goes! More often than not, the service provider will store the message in plain text. If your recipient uses another email or internet service provider, your message could be (and probably is) transmitted in plain text. There’s no way to know for sure.
Therefore, even if you protected yourself from the person sniffing the public WiFi network that you are using, does the recipient of your message receive the message in a secured environment?
Using a secure TLS/SSL connection
It’s quite easy to secure the incoming and outgoing mail connection. All you need is a server that is secured with a valid and authoritative SSL certificate. If your emails are hosted with Funio, for example, all you need is to use the secure server configurations in your mail client. And it’s free!
Read this article from our knowledge base to learn about the necessary server configurations to secure your incoming and outgoing emails in your mail client.
A few last words
Although the emails we send daily were not designed with any privacy or security in mind, with the right tools, it is possible to secure them. Even if this security is partial, at least it isn’t non-existent. If everyone puts in a bit of effort to secure the sending and receiving of their emails, we will all participate in building a more secure web for all!
