Do you encrypt your email? I didn’t think so. I don’t either. Not that I don’t want to, I would but it’s too freakin’ hard. Hard? Come on there are tons of ways to encrypt your email, right? Sure, but the problem isn’t the encrypting but the decrypting that is the issue. Yeah I can encrypt my email message to you, but going through the rigmarole for the recipient to decrypt it can be painful at best.
I’m not alone in this wonder/worry CNET had a good piece on it recently—To encrypt or not? That is the question | News – Security – CNET News—with pretty much the same conclusion. Which begs the question: Why is it so hard?
Gmail took a great step in letting you set it to always use HTTPS—something I recommend everyone set as default—Yahoo and Live Mail have support for encryption, but …
No one uses it. So, it is your email really at risk? Should your day-to-day communications be encrypted? Probably not. The problem is that when you should encrypt something, you don’t.
Come on, is it really a risk? Is your one email going to make it through the clutter and noise? Nah, probably not, assuming that someone isn’t looking for your stuff.
Ask Sarah Palin. Granted, even if she had encrypted her emails, she would have had to leave them encrypted to have been really protected, however it would have been a start.
What is there to do? Personally I have Gmail set to https all the time. I also refrain from doing FTP, etc at an unsecured hotspot unless I have to. Same goes for banking, etc.
Easy encryption was one of the hallmarks of Groove (purchased by MSFT), now it seems that people don’t really care.
I guess we still have to ask, how safe is your email?
