Use GMail? There May Be Some Good E-mail Security News for You.

From a July 25, 2007 blog, George Ou, of Real World IT has some interesting, and important, information for you about e-mail use and privacy.

In "Email security has been around forever, you just need to turn it on" , he says it may be possible for you to ensure your e-mail communications remain private, depending upon who your server may be, that is. I am using large bits of his exact wording, as I don't want to make a mistake in explaining.

"To enable Server to Client encryption", he says, "you simply check a simple option to enable SSL and type a different port number for your POP3 (inbound) and SMTP (outbound) Mail Server settings in your email client...AT&T like most ISPs supports SSL encryption on POP3 and SMTP and it’s as simple as a checkmark and using ports 995 for POP3 and 465 for SMTP instead of the usual ports 110 and 25."

However, AT&T "doesn't disable unencrypted mode" and Google doesn’t "disable http mode", so the vast majority of the users will continue to use un-secured e-mailing, and Hotmail "doesn’t support payload encryption".

If you use Gmail, you have a ready solution at hand. "...typing in https:// mail.google. com (not http://) and your entire authentication and web mail session is encrypted with export-restricted grade SSL encryption." I believe the "s" in the "https" stands for secure.

Please see Mr. Ou's article for more information. His colleague, David Berlind, offers an opposing view.

Who is correct? I dunno, but it seems to be an important topic to be aware of. As Sargeant Phil Esterhaus of "Hill Street Blues" used to say, "Hey, let's be careful out there."