What is Email Security?

Email security is the process of protecting email communication in the transmission and storage of private, personal, and commercial information sent through email. It includes content filtering, antivirus software, and encryption algorithms to ensure data privacy, while at the same time preventing loss or unauthorized access.

Email security best practices are a set of recommended strategies that can help protect electronic communications, such that their intended content is not compromised or altered.

There are three main categories of email security: digital (scalable),physical (modifiable),and procedural.

a. Digital – It involves making sure your emails are encrypted in transit and that they can’t be read by unauthorized parties.

b. Physical – This type of security is used when you need to lock down a particular piece of data, such as an email message or attachment. The goal here is to prevent anyone from changing or deleting the content of the stored file. To do this, we might use a password or code that only individuals with access rights can access.

c. Procedural – It’s about making sure that people who have permission can view or change information in the email system without having malicious intent towards the company itself or its customers.

How Secure Are Standard Email Protocols?

Standard email protocols, such as SMTP and POP3, were originally implemented to allow for a reliable exchange of messages between systems.

However, there’s no standard for the use of secure transport mechanisms (such as SSL and TLS) in a standard email protocol field. They do not specify any connection types at all. Although this may seem like a small detail, it can have large implications for the security of your data and its integrity.

This means if you send an email between two systems that are not using SSL or TLS, that communication could potentially be intercepted by an attacker without you knowing it. This could mean sensitive information being read in plain text or compromised passwords being sent over unencrypted channels.

For example, when you send an email using SMTP over port 25, your message travels through the Internet and then is sent to a server on your network. If someone intercepts it, they can read it without any encryption.

Another issue is that with standard protocols your emails are stored in an unencrypted format on email servers. This means that anyone with access to the server (for example, a system administrator) can read the email. It also means that if the server gets compromised, all of your emails could be exposed to hackers.

In addition, most protocols on the user side of email are unfortunately not secure. Most protocols rely on simple username/password combinations which can be bypassed via advanced social engineering attacks.

Therefore, standard email protocols are insecure due to their failure to account for man-in-the-middle attacks, which is the type of attack that occurs when an attacker with the ability to intercept and modify traffic between two parties (such as your computer and the server you’re trying to communicate with) sits between those two systems and alters it to show something that wasn’t sent or received.