Conventional email offers absolutely no privacy or security at all, not even the presumption of privacy. Email typically goes from your computer, through your link provider (cable, DSL, or dial-up, etc.) to your ISP, then to regional and major communication backbones, to the destination ISP, through the link, through a local network, and finally to the destination computer. Email is customarily scanned and archived at every hop- your email is not even as private as a handwritten postcard. Do you really want your medical, legal, and financial records, and personal correspondence available to anyone and kept forever?  Wireless networks are easily cracked and are another common way private data is exposed in transit.

What about SSL? Doesn't that lock icon on the bottom of the browser window mean that your email is protected?  No!  SSL is a technology that protects data in transit. If you have an SSL-capable email provider and the necessary certificates installed in your browser, then your personal information is only encrypted between you and your email provider. After that, it's business as usual, travelling unsecured as plain text over the various links to the final destination with the possibility of being scanned and archived every step of the way.

Privacy Systems, Ltd. can set up a secure end-to-end email solution which meets your needs using proven, industry-standard encryption and application-layer security protocols like S/MIME (RFC3851) and OpenPGP (RFC1991, RFC3156, RFC2440, RFC4880) to provide authentication, privacy, and non-repudiation of your email.

Email can be digitally signed. Although signing is a very technical topic, one important thing to know is that today's S/MIME and OpenPGP implementations bundle authentication and non-repudiation in the digital signing function. That means that if your email client shows a good signature, then you can be assured that the email was not altered in transit, and that it was created by the person in possession of the signing key- this prevents someone from forging or altering the email.  Properly signed and encrypted email is immune to virtually every form of attack except Denial of Service (DOS) where emails are deleted, delayed, or sent multiple times.  If you verify a digitally-signed message, you are assured of its integrity and authenticity.

Email can be encrypted. This means that it's completely illegible to anyone who doesn't have the key, and cracking the code is considered to be "computationally infeasable." Properly set up, encryption and signing together comprise not only an end-to-end method of securing your email, but also protect against forgery of new email and unauthorized disclosure of existing email if a computer is stolen, as long as your private keys are protected by strong passphrases.  Next page...