Whether intended or not, our email today regularly contains private financial details, confidential business information and sensitive material on our personal lives – from medical conditions to private communications about relationships, to identity information about us, our families and friends. In the wrong hands, this information is easily abused. An increasing number of people have learned the cost of becoming a victim. Most of us know someone whose email account was inexplicably hacked, identity impersonated or information intercepted, so we have seen those vulnerabilities. And the stakes are becoming ever higher.

Identity thieves, cybercriminals, unethical business rivals, potential lawsuit adversaries, snooping journalists, untrustworthy governments in places we stay or visit, and corrupt officials are among the many people who have something to gain at our expense from access to our private information and communications. It is not necessarily about having something to hide – it is more about the growing number of people who recognize the value to be exploited by gaining access to our private information, whether through intercepting our communications, defeating weak security or using legal or administrative means.

Few public email services are designed with a clear focus on privacy and security. For those that are, most implement it remarkably poorly, with significant technical and legal weaknesses.

For the free public email services offered by the consumer Internet companies, you are the product – with data about you, gathered from your private information, packaged to generate sales to advertisers. You are effectively trading part of your privacy for free or nearly free service. And since effective security is more expensive in resources, sometimes there is far less than you might imagine, such as inadequate encryption of your data and passwords, creating other vulnerabilities. The losses of millions of user passwords by many large consumer Internet companies illustrates their often poor security.

Most paid-for email services – even supposedly privacy-oriented ones – base their operating companies or email servers in countries where local regulations mean your information has limited legal protection and where your privacy can be easily breached. If your email is not adequately encrypted or the decryption keys are stored or accessible locally, then a breach of your privacy in a single jurisdiction can lead to unintended release of your emails.

To implement effective security on private email servers requires a level of specialist technical expertise that is rarely available to small to medium-sized organizations – most of the truly capable security specialists are hired by major banks, defense companies, IT security firms and government security agencies. Unless your business is in one of those fields or similar, it is unlikely that your email server is adequately secured.

For background on recent problems and weaknesses that leave most email vulnerable, visit our News and Articles section.

Many countries have general data privacy laws but then implement other regulations that undermine them, allowing access by far more people to your communications than you intended. For example, in the European Union and Norway, the EU Data Retention Directive (2006/24/EC) enforces the mandatory retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services. With slight variations by country, this information is then available to various agencies without your knowledge. But a bigger issue is that private service providers themselves are forced to hold this data at their own expense, with no obligations to encrypt or provide high levels of security, making the data vulnerable to theft, malicious hacking, release via subpoena or lawsuit or accidental disclosure.

In the US, the Stored Communications Act, part of the Electronic Communication Privacy Act of 1986, allows access to your email by authorities. In most of the US, all that is required to read your email is an administrative subpoena, which does not require any approval by a court.

MailTight works only in jurisdictions where a court order approved by a local judge is required for the release of any information. Since MailTight encrypts your emails and does not hold the decryption keys, your emails are protected by a far higher level of legal privacy and security.

With MailTight, you shouldn’t need to do anything differently once you switch over to using the MailTight secure servers. All your email will work as before, except you will have greater privacy and security – and in many cases improved reliability too. You can continue to use your iPad, iPhone, Android phone, Blackberry and most other devices. Your existing email software – such as Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail or Thunderbird – will also work as before, provided it is up-to-date. You can use a mailtight.com email address or you can use your own internet domain – such as mybusiness.com – we ensure that even for large numbers of users it is a relatively painless transition.

If you already have an activation code, then please click here to sign up. Otherwise, please contact us or your reseller for information on how to subscribe to use MailTight and safeguard your privacy and security.