Secure email

SSL connections have been built into email services on the Internet. This applies to webmail as well as to hosted email. Some webmail accounts offering such security measures free of charge are:

• https://www.riseup.net
• http://www.bluebottle.co.uk
• https://www.fastmail.fm
• https://www.safe-mail.net
• https://gmail.com

These webmail services allow you to enter your email account and communicate with it on an encrypted connection. Even though this data can still be captured by any filtering or surveillance mechanism, it will be next to impossible to make sense of it or decrypt it. Notice how the address is deliberately written with ‘https:’ in the beginning.

Essentially, this creates a much more private method for reading and writing email. Used with a good password it will pave the way to securing your Internet communications. Registering one of these email accounts does not differ at all from registering with Yahoo or Hotmail. The reason is that the majority of webmail providers do not offer SSL connections to their clients.