E-Mail – More Secure Than a Postcard

• Author: David Canton
• Date: March 30, 2016

The Apple – FBI tempest got me thinking about email security. (Even though that fight was over device security, not email platform and transmission security.)

Email security has improved over the past couple of years, no doubt in part due to the Snowden – NSA revelations. Many providers of hardware, software, internet infrastructure, and online services have taken steps to implement encryption in general, and to plug the gaps in the chain where encryption was missing. Some, for example, had gaps as they passed email to other mail providers unencrypted, even if they encrypted it while they had it. Encryption while in transmission is the baseline everyone should be working towards.

Anyone with their own mail server can enable TLS (transport layer security) to encrypt email that travels to...