Hi All,
I always believed that in the olden day?s (10-20 years ago). email travelling across the internet Was unencrypted and insecure.
Recently a couple of people have suggested to me that these days it?s encrypted and always was.
Is it?
Was it?
TIA
Chris
Yes, almost always
No, not always
Secure 'in transit' as it were. A lot of people with server access at each end could just read it if they wanted.
TW
Unless *you* apply *your* encryption, it's best to treat email like a postcard. All points in between source and destination can have a good old gander.
For some reason my brothers are obsessed with privacy to the extent that all emails are PGP encrypted and they have to use a secure messaging system "Signal" for text/voice (when you make a vox call it generates a letter code you tell the other party so "they know it's you" ??????). All they've done is ensure that in a morass of normality, they're probably the only two that leap out at the spooks.
The problem with encrypting email is the need for the recipient to be able to manage it. The chances of which decrease exponentially the more random your emailing might be.
There's also a subtlety (I think) in that a lot of "encryption" is really more about sender verification - knowing that a message from <x> really is from <x> despite what the headers might say.
It may be.
It wasn't.
Any in the middle entryptioon is typiaclly removed by te last mail server in te chain. So if for example yuou use gmmail, all yuoir mail is tsored in plain on thneir servers.
It may get encrypted between there and you briefly, and it may bave been entrpted up till then.
But there is no 'end to end' encryption. Unless you use PGP which is frankly a swine to set up.
And requires the recipient to have the same.
Sometimes. Increasingly so these days.
Rarely. Logins weren't encrypted, mail transport wasn't encrypted either.
Depends on what you mean by encrypted I guess. You most certainly could send encrypted email, but not many actually bothered most of the time. Brian
Yes the packets could be intercepted if they all went the same way I guess.
There really is no such thing as secure, just the likelihood of it being insecure. After all in transit you first have to be looking when it goes past unless you want to store everything, examine it and then pass it on and I'd imagine that would end up with a detectable latency!
I think in many ways the biggest danger today is that if somebody gets lots of little clues about a person they may be able to identify them even if the identity was encrypted as this is how private investigators used to work with paper clues. Brian
Correct.
More than it used to be...
no
It is more common these days to use an encrypted connection between the mail client and the mail server, and web mail portals will almost always be https these days. However unencrypted access between client and server is still permitted and used in many cases.
Also although likely that servers will use encrypted connections between themselves, its not something that can be guaranteed by the user since you have no control over the intermediate hosts handling the mail. You also have no guarantee that the message content will not at some point reside in an unencrypted mail store on a mail transfer agent somewhere in the system.
Thanks all!
well, it can be done opportunistically when sending nd receiving sever support it, but it's only encrypted in transit, not when at rest, and it would be unwise to rely on it ... if you need encryption, do your own.
No it isn't and it never was, with the exception of mail between your supplier and your device, which didn't used to be but now can be. Internet mail between servers uses SMTP which isn't encrypted.
With a large number of users coalescing around gmail.com, office365/outlook.com/hotmail.com etc, they do use SMTP between servers when the sender and receiver both support it
Search for TLS or SMTPS in headers, you may be surprised, but it isn't universal.
pretty sure it can be and routinely is. But not universally.
Viz TLS and friends.
When you specify TLS for an E-Mail account I think it simply means that TLS is used to encrypt the password, not when actually transferring the E-Mail.
My understanding is that SMTP (which is a lot of e-mail) is not secure.
Compare ordinary http (non secure) to https (secure).
The connection between your e-mail programme (whether it's web based or client based) may be secure but that only covers when you collect/read your e-mail, not when it's in transmission.
Variable - there may be TLS in the server to server path. This is not guranteed and is the weak point.
Likely there is TLS in the mail client to first server path.
Likely there is TLS in the final server to mail client path.
No, not even close. For a long time, pop was unencrypted as was SMTP from both client and server2server.
If you use STARTTLS, or SSL[1] for the transport layer, then the entire content is encrypted for transport as well.
[1] SSL using secure sockets layer and all of the conversation between client and mail server is encrypted from the start. STARTLS starts the connection on an unencrypted link, but then negotiates up to a fully encrypted one for the message exchange takes place.
I stand corrected!
As you say though, not universal, so can't rely on encryption (yet).
It's getting there. Most large-scale tests report e.g.
The vast majority of this is with opportunistic TLS which is pretty much as vulnerable to compromise to no TLS at all as the session initiation is performed in the clear and thus is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack. Mandatory TLS for all SMTP traffic is becoming the ultimate goal with various mechanisms now emerging to enabled a gradual move towards that.
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