Recent Email Scandal Reminds Us That Email Is Not Secure

In light of the recent news that Yahoo cooperated with the U.S. government and scanned millions of users’ email accounts, it’s a good time to review email security.

Email is not a secure form of communication, generally. It's not even secure at work. There are some services and companies that do provide encrypted email, but it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that whatever you write in a message will stay private. There are various forms of encryption and not all of them are so secure. Some, in fact, are not much more secure than adding a password to a file. It just makes it a little more time-consuming for someone to crack it.

So, when sending email, always remember that at any time, someone may be reading it and it doesn’t even have to be (and likely won’t be) the government. In fact, it could be hackers looking for sensitive information such as social security numbers, credit card details, and other items that they can use for identity theft and/or fraud.

This brings up the important point that you should never send sensitive or confidential information via email. If you have to provide your social security number or credit card information to someone, call him or her on the phone. Even using the regular U.S. Postal Service is better than putting it in an email message.

Email servers are also not a secure way to store data. The text you write, the photos you send, and everything else you may include in a message is stored on a computer somewhere and likely is not encrypted or secured to any real degree. So, if you need to keep a file safe, store it elsewhere. Email is merely a delivery system.

We use email for so many things these days that it’s likely your email address is all over the Internet in some way. So, make sure you change your associated passwords on a regular basis. This means more than after a breach has occurred and more often than every five years. The best routine is to do this on a quarterly basis, but at least yearly. While you’re changing your smoke detector batteries, change your email password too. Why not?

If you haven’t heard the story, Yahoo was asked by U.S. authorities to create special software in order to scan email messages for a particular phrase in all incoming emails. Yahoo stated it was convinced it would lose any legal action against it and therefore made the decision to cooperate.