Understanding Secure Email

Question

I\'ve got a question about securing emails with SSL.

If I get an SSL certificate to secure my email, that would mean that the connection between my mail client and my ma

Answer 1

Only the connection between your client (if correctly configured) and your server will be encrypted (same for the recipients end), once the email leaves your server on its way to your recipients mailserver it will be open for all to see.

Ie. You (using SSL) -> SECURE -> Your Server -> UNSECURE -> Internet -> UNSECURE -> Recipient's Server -> SECURE -> Recipient (using SSL).

To ensure secure delivery the email needs to be encrypted end-to-end (ie. the actual contents of the email - rather than just the delivery to/from the server). This can be done through several differnt mechanism (see Wikipedia for a list) one of the more common ones is using PGP for email (see google for more).

There is a risk of people listening in on both the internal network and in the cloud, the probabilities of eitehr i am not sure on but i would say the internal network would generally be the more liekly location of a 'listener'.