What does email encryption mean?

Email encryption is a process in which your email content is disguised or ‘encrypted’ to protect sensitive information from being accessed by anyone other than the intended recipient. This kind of information may include things like National Insurance numbers or bank details.

It’s not just this kind of information that email encryption is restricted to either. This can also be a way to stop hackers and scammers from accessing things like attachments, links and even potentially stop them from taking over your entire email account.

Email can be very unsecure especially if they are sent over unsecured networks or public Wi-Fi. Even emails that are sent through a secured company network can be intercepted and potentially reveal things like login details.

Encrypting your emails makes them unreadable as they travel to their destination. This means that even if they are intercepted the contents cannot be read by hackers.

What should you encrypt?

There are 3 main things that you should encrypt in order to be safe:

Connection from email provider

Encrypting the connection means that hackers cannot intercept emails on their way to their destination. In doing so it means that they cannot access the contents of the email which may store lots of sensitive information like passwords.

Your actual emails

Encrypting your emails before they are sent means that, even if they are interrupted, then the hackers cannot read the email and that renders them useless to the attacker.

Your archived emails

Some of your saved emails may contain sensitive information that you may need to go back to later. Many people use this to store some login details or special codes to login to certain websites. It’s important that these are encrypted as hackers can gain access to these and access all the linked accounts.

So, what does email encrypting do?

There are a variety of different method and tools you can use to encrypt emails.

The method that is widely used is a personal email certificate. This is a type of measure that digitally signs your emails. This means that it drastically reduces the amount of spam emails that can be sent using your name and account. The signature lets other users know that it was actually sent by you and that it can be trusted if they see it. Fake messages sent with your name will not contain the digital signature which will let recipients know that the email may contain spam or unsafe content.

Email encryption, much like most other types of encryptions, relies on a public key infrastructure (PKI). The way that a PKI usually works is:

• The person sending the email will use a public key to encrypt the email into something unreadable without a key
• The intended recipient will have a private key that is only known between the sender and receiver
• The recipient will then use that key to decrypt the email into a readable format once again

When using this PKI model, anybody can use a public key to encrypt their emails, however, if the recipient wants to decrypt it, they must use a unique private key to do so.

A good way to make sure that you are safe from hackers is to get into the groove of encrypting all of the emails that you send and not just the ones that have sensitive information inside. If you only encrypt the emails that contain the personal data, then you are just showing the attackers where to look to find the sensitive data that they want.

When you get into the swing of encrypting all of your emails that you send, it then means that the hackers will not know where to start to look for your sensitive information and will make their life much, much harder. The tedious task of trying to decrypt every email one-by-one is something that most hackers won’t even bother with or won’t have the time to do.