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October 10, 2008Many email providers offer you a few different ways to connect to their servers in order to send and receive your email. Some of those options involve security (either TLS or SSL) and can give the false impression that your email is now somewhow “secure”. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth.
Email is an insecure medium. It travels from server to server unencrypted and therefore anyone with the desire and wherewithall can read your email as it flies by.
So what’s the point of opting to connect to an email server to send/receive using encryption? Well, arguably, not much.
I use Fastmail and connect using TLS to their servers to gather and send my email. However, I know that all this does is ensure that my email is encrypted between my computer and their servers. Once I have sent something to their server, it becomes fair game for anyone. My incoming email got on to the Fastmail server unencrypted so encrypting it to download it to my computer is kind of “barn door after the horse” stuff.
So why do I bother? For one reason and one reason only – to protect my email account and the password I use on it.
While encrypting my incoming and outgoing email between my computer and the mail server isn’t all that useful, encrypting my password is very useful. Since my password never goes beyond their server, every time I pass it, it is encrypted and therefore impossible (?) to compromise.
Bottom line – I recommend using secure connections where possible to collect and send email, but don’t be under the illusion that this does anything to protect your email from prying eyes. It only protects your email password.
Tags: email, fastmail, Security
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