email-not-secret-therefore-4

E-mail privacy, without some security precautions, can be compromised because:

• e-mail messages are generally not encrypted;
• e-mail messages have to go through intermediate computers before
  reaching their destination, meaning it is relatively easy for others to
  intercept and read messages;
• many Internet Service Providers (ISP) store copies of your e-mail
  messages on their mail servers before they are delivered. The backups
  of these can remain up to several months on their server, even if you
  delete them in your mailbox;
• the Received: headers and other information in the e-mail can often identify the sender, preventing anonymous communication.

There are cryptography applications that can serve as a remedy to one or more of the above. For example, Virtual Private Networks or the Tor anonymity network can be used to encrypt traffic from the user machine to a safer network while GPG, PGP, or S/MIME can be used for end-to-end message encryption, and SMTP STARTTLS or SMTP over Transport Layer Security/Secure Sockets Layer can be used to encrypt communications for a single mail hop between the SMTP client and the SMTP server.

Additionally, many mail user agents do not protect logins and passwords, making them easy to intercept by an attacker. Encrypted authentication schemes such as SASL prevent this.

Finally, attached files share many of the same hazards as those found in peer-to-peer filesharing. Attached files may contain trojans or viruses.
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email-origin-1

Electronic mail, often abbreviated to e-mail, email, or originally eMail, is a store-and-forward method of writing, sending, receiving and saving messages over electronic communication systems.

My way of saying "WISH YOU ALL HAPPY 2009!"
What is email?

The term
"e-mail" (as a noun or verb) applies to the Internet e-mail system based on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, to network systems based on other protocols and to various mainframe, minicomputer, or internet by a particular systems vendor, or on the same protocols used on public networks. E-mail is often used to deliver bulk unsolicited messages, or "spam", but filter programs exist which can automatically block, quarantine or delete some or most of these, depending on the situation.

E-mail predates the inception of the Internet, and was in fact a crucial tool in creating the Internet. MIT first demonstrated the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) in 1961. It allowed multiple users to log into the IBM 7094^[16]
from remote dial-up terminals, and to store files online on disk. This
new ability encouraged users to share information in new ways. E-mail
started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate. Although the exact history is murky, among the first systems to have such a facility were SDC's Q32 and MIT's CTSS.

E-mail was quickly extended to become network e-mail, allowing users to pass messages between different computers by at least 1966 (it is possible the SAGE system had something similar some time before).

The ARPANET computer network
made a large contribution to the development of e-mail. There is one
report that indicates experimental inter-system e-mail transfers began
shortly after its creation in 1969. Ray Tomlinson initiated the use of the @ sign to separate the names of the user and their machine in 1971. The ARPANET significantly increased the popularity of e-mail, and it became the killer app of the ARPANET.

         Source

E-mail - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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