E-mail is a technology that is here to stay, and billions of e-mails are sent each day between people and organizations. Because of the increased popularity in e-mail, there have been widespread attempts to intercept and capture e-mail based communications.
One of the major flaws in e-mail is that it is it utilizes plain-text transmission of messages. This effectively means anyone that is listening in to your computer by way of network analyzer or even WIFI sniffer can read your e-mails.
It is as simple as hooking into the network, turning the sniffer / analyzer on and analyzing the packets, which are being sent. Given our trust and reliance on e-mail, this clearly creates a whole raft of issues for the security conscious individual and corporation.
Sadly, the adoption of cryptographic technologies in SMTP and POP protocols is extremely limited, so the only way in which one can achieve e-mail security is using third party programs, which can encrypt messages almost transparently and thus guaranteeing another level of security.
Another weak-link in the chain of e-mail security is that of webmail. Webmail is notorious for being easy to crack due to the fact many providers only use SSL to authenticate sessions, not to actually encrypt individual messages.
Once again, users face the problem of plaintext data, which in this case is exposed in the HTTP protocol. This means that any malicious parties on the network with access to packet sniffing software can see the plaintext web pages. As a direct result, the only solution available is to use third party encryption to encrypt the content of text sent via e-mail.
E-mail in some cases now rivals telephone communications and because of this, it is important to ensure that appropriate safeguards are in place when transmitting any sensitive information.