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E-mail Security / Privacy
The Problem:
Often, people are convinced that their e-mail is secure. Generally, however, if someone wants to read it they can. How? Well, they can either break into your ISP (Internet Service Provider), steal your password, or do other more technical things that they probably won´t bother doing anyway.
In addition, your boss has the right to read your work e-mail. That´s right -- any e-mail going through your office e-mail account belongs to your company. To combat this problem, your only choice is Method One, described below.
The Symptoms:
The symptoms are pretty obvious... People knowing things they shouldn´t know, that you´ve only said in e-mail -- that kinda thing. Sometimes people will come right out and tell you they´re reading your e-mail.
The Solutions:
There are two approaches you can take to protecting your e-mail: you can encrypt it or you can protect your actual e-mail account.
Method One:
Protecting your e-mail by encrypting it is generally the easiest, if least convenient solution. First thing you have to do is download Pretty Good Privacy, the best over-the-counter encryption tool out there. PGP will make your plaintext messages turn to gibberish that only you and the recipient can decode. You can download PGP from OSAll. To learn more about PGP, visit the PGP how.to.
Method Two:
You can, of course, secure your e-mail account against future infiltration by all but the more skilled hackers / crackers. There are several steps involved:
A seven character non-word, non-name password using both letters and numbers is acceptable (more than seven characters is usually ignored).
Call your Internet Service Provider and tell them that you know your e-mail is being read. Insist that they switch your account to another mail server, if possible. If they´re not big enough to switch your e-mail to another server, insist that they perform a security audit on that machine.
If necessary, switch Internet Service Providers.
Good luck!
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