As a form of communication on the internet, email is one of the very earliest forms of passing information from one party to another over a network. The very first organizations on the internet adopted the email protocol as a means of passing research and company notes to people that were in different geographical locations and this worked to improve the rate at which scientific advances were able to grow. Scientists were able to pass ideas to each other and as email improved, adding attachments to the emails was made possible and this meant that additional file-sharing capabilities that had been added to the email protocol upgraded the functionality that was provided by email. As email adoption increased, the issue of security started becoming a concern as some of the users of the service felt that they needed to increase the confidentiality of the information they shared over the protocol which led to the securing of email services. Modern day email service providers are even resorting to self-destructive emails which acts as a form of sending instant messages and immediately the message has been read by the receiver, then the email deletes itself and not a copy of the message is left on any of the machines that were involved in the communication.
Such forms of email security not only add a layer of protection to the emails, but it also gets the participants more confident of the nature of their conversations and nothing that they communicate with each other gets to be leaked to third parties. Email headers are usually encrypted with information concerning the email and are used to turn the email messaging into gibberish while it is still in transit. This is known as encryption and makes the message unreadable to anyone who is not involved in the communication. Even if the email gets to be received by an unknowing third party, the encryption information in the header will prevent them from opening the email and they will not be able to find out what was in the email message.
Securing email is seen as one of the very important factors for a better and more secure internet and with security measures applied to email, communications becomes more confidential and the participants are not afraid to include information that is required for both the parties involved to understand what they are conversing about. The openness of the communication does not imply that the encryption is any way weaker or less secure but instead, the security protocols are improved and an instant form of sending and receiving messages is formed. Whenever one begins to type an email to someone else, the security protocols kick in and the message gets encoded in such a manner that it is sealed off from the rest of the world and only the person whose email appear in the sent portion of the message will be able to open it. For the rest of the internet, the email will be innocuous traffic which doesn’t matter to them.
