Secure Email

[neilm]

I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts or suggestions about vamping up security measures of email transfer. The situation is our work sends off emails to customers, but some information could be seen as sensitive if a wrong person obtained it (sending to a wrong email address for example).

Is there anyway to help avoid this scenerio happening? would say PGP encryption be a solution or does customers have to be setup with specific email clients for that (as emails are destinated to go anywhere like hotmail, aol, yahoo, and others)? Any other ideas?

Thanks.

 

[corkyg]

Encryption is presently the only way. The Internet is not at all secure - neither is the telephone because they both end up transmitting RF through the air. That is open to intercept.

If you want to be secure in communicating with someone, you must both use the same encryption scheme. 128 bit is moderately good. The most secure is a one time pad, i.e., the same keys are never used again. But, nothing is perfect.

There really is no such thing as 100% security.

 

[neilm]

Thanks for the reply. I'm not totally sure how everything in email encryption works, but in a company to customer email generation, where a customer can have any email client, and any operating system, and any webbased account would pgp encryption still work?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: neilm
Thanks for the reply. I'm not totally sure how everything in email encryption works, but in a company to customer email generation, where a customer can have any email client, and any operating system, and any webbased account would pgp encryption still work?

Yes.

 

[neilm]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: neilm
Thanks for the reply. I'm not totally sure how everything in email encryption works, but in a company to customer email generation, where a customer can have any email client, and any operating system, and any webbased account would pgp encryption still work?

Yes.

These emails are system generated to a vast amount of customers, from my little knowledge of PGP stuff, wouldn't both parties need to sign signatures for this to work successfully... and because of the volume of emails sent by the email, I'm not sure how that is possible.