Email at Your Own Risk
Hijackers, hackers and viruses make cyber-highways dangerous

Email is the main way many of us use the Internet. With close to one billion personal and corporate accounts, Forrester Research predicts the Internet will carry 1.5 billion emails a day within two years. All that traffic makes email one of the Internet’s top privacy soft spots. 

The Email that Wouldn't Die
Email is about as private as a postcard. On the Internet, your messages travel through several computer servers on their way to your recipients, and typically, each server stores a copy. Unless you use encryption, any savvy stranger can track down and examine your most sensitive, personal correspondence. Years from now, messages you thought were buried and forgotten may spring up to haunt you.

No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
Popular free email services, such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Mailcity, and email.com, offer the least protection. For instance, in September 1999, hackers cracked open every Hotmail account so that anyone who knew a person's username could access that account and read the contents without a password. Unlike an Internet Service Provider (ISP), these free services archive your email online. ISP services transfer the messages you open to your own hard drive, so a successful hacker can read only the email you haven’t opened yet.

Free Web-based email services "are inherently insecure," says Peter Neumann, a researcher at SRI International.

Your Boss is Watching
What’s more, if you send personal email from work, your boss can read it! Your employer has both the ability and the legal right to store and read any personal information you send or receive at your workplace. Financial services firms, law firms and others that deal with sensitive information routinely use computer programs to scan emails for keywords that suggest confidential information may be going out. For example, AT&T automatically checks 1 million employee emails a day.

The Hidden Risks
Email can also carry viruses. Last year’s Melissa virus was just the first of many widespread email-based "worms." On a Monday morning, as workers began opening infected emails, Melissa started moving. She used Microsoft ‘macros’ to reproduce and spread. Macros are software embedded in the Windows operating system that trigger a sequence of computer functions with a single command. Melissa commanded the infected machines to send out more email bearing her myriad of offspring and overloading servers all over the ‘Net. She went global in six hours.

Modern-Day Pirates
If that’s not enough, there’s email hijacking. Online crooks can take over your email account to send messages without your knowledge. In January, 2000, WebTV announced it was repairing a security hole that allowed third parties to hijack WebTV accounts. These creative swindlers had hidden hijack codes in certain Web sites. When WebTV users visited these sites, the codes grabbed their email accounts and started pumping out messages.

Where are the Cops When You Need Them? 
It turns out, the law may not always be able to help. Legal experts warn that our privacy protection rights are fragile and uncertain. More than once, courts have forced online service providers to turn over subscriber names, phone numbers, and other information. If you’re involved in a lawsuit, you can be forced to recover and divulge emails you sent a long time ago. Many cases involve information posted on message boards. In fact, all online communication tools are becoming frequent targets of law enforcement investigation.

The legal climate is unsettled. Some 131 Internet or electronic mail privacy bills are pending in 31 states. At the same time, a federal commission assigned to study Internet law has urged Uncle Sam to strip away anonymity from the Web. They want to allow “real-time tracing of Internet communications across traditional jurisdictional boundaries,” in order to track criminals who use the Net to commit crimes and hide their identities. 

Right now, no U.S. laws require us to reveal our identities before signing up for Internet access or Web services, including anonymous email services. The commission’s report says ISPs should be encouraged-though not yet required-to keep records of what their users are doing online.

Making Email More Private  
Viruses and unwanted ads are just some of the issues

Email is the single most popular feature of the Internet, carrying everything from jokes and personal letters to corporate documents – not to mention porn ads, viruses and unwanted pitches for get-rich-quick scams. If you’re not careful, these can rapidly outnumber legitimate messages from your friends, family and coworkers.

Here are some tips on limiting your “junk email”:  

• Do not open or respond to emails of unknown origin – they can carry viruses. If they don’t, they may still be spam, and responding lets the spammer know they have found a live address.  

• Report spam to your Internet service provider.  

• Recognize that email almost never disappears – a copy of it is still on a server somewhere.    

• Consider using an encrypted email service for sensitive messages (like our own Free PerfectlyPrivate Encrypted Email Service).

• Consider using disappearing-email software, such as products from Disappearing Inc. and Interosa, to automatically ‘expire’ sensitive emails and to prevent forwarding, saving or editing.

• Consider using an anonymous re-mailer to protect your privacy. Anonymous remailers send your email through one or more automated proxy email services before delivering it to the final destination. It’s a bit like mailing a letter without a return address. Some remailers replace your email address with a pseudonym; others offer some level of encryption. Some involve downloading software; others involve sending your email to a Web-based re-mailing service. Some remailers will hold your email for a random amount of time to obscure not only your identity, but the time the mail was sent.

• Check the site’s privacy policy before signing up for any automated email newsletter to see if they rent or sell your information to third parties.  

• Don’t use unencrypted Web-based email services for transmitting sensitive information. Email sent this way will reside on the Web site’s servers and may be more vulnerable to intruders than email sent through your Internet Service Provider.  

• Consider establishing a second email account at a Web-based email service to use when registering for email-delivered products at Web sites. This can help you by establishing an anonymous identity. It can also be used as a place for tracking unsolicited emails. It also keeps such spam out of your main email box.   

• In the office, use a Web-based email account instead of your work email address for receiving personal emails. If your company has a policy against personal use of work email systems, or if you don’t want to risk your employer seeing your personal messages, this is a simple and free solution. But remember – Web-based emails are frequently less secure from privacy intrusions than email through your Internet Service Provider.

• Never give out your email address in an open chat room or post it on an open message board. Spammers often use software “spiders” to grab email addresses from chat rooms and message boards.