All Things Email

About | Contact

Privacy and Anonymity in Email

by David Mertz

O'Reilly & Associates, 2003-06-12
Language: English

External links

Full text: HTML

Abstract

As convenient as email is, it leaves much to be desired in terms of protecting the privacy of messages. There are two aspects to the limitation. On the one hand, email messages are very susceptible to interception and tampering by a variety of parties (ISPs, hackers, government, spammers, and others). On the other hand, email does not directly provide for anonymous communication (an important bastion of freedom of expression). Technical means can largely bridge both these gaps. This article provides a rundown of techniques for encryption, remailing, identity masking, and authentication of messages. Both existing tools and general programming techniques are addressed.

Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.
Copyright © 2004 Jochen Topf
Unless otherwise noted the contents on this site are licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.