In the corporate world, e-mail is a major form of communication. Even institutions use e-mail to regularly correspond with customers. When e-mail systems were designed, they were meant to be a means of exchanging plain text messages, electronically. And since e-mail is plain text, anyone can read it using a simple text editor. The message is relayed through various servers around the world till it reaches the intended recipient's Inbox. Today, that functionality remains the same. That's potentially a privacy threat because anyone can read your message on any of the servers it passes through. Think of it as a postcard going through various post offices around the world.

Encryption is a way to protect your mail so that no one except the intended recipient can see it. Anyone who tries to read an encrypted mail en route will only see "junk" characters. Encrypted or encoded mails are digtially signed and sealed. This is enabled through an encryption algorithm, a set of mathematical rules that determine how mail contents are scrambled.

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Fortunately, you do not have to learn these encryption algorithms or dabble in mathematics. There are free encryption software tools that do the job quite effectively. Of course, they are not so easy to use, and it takes time to learn them. For a long time PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) was available for free and was considered to be the best encryption tool. Now it is commercialized, although a free 3D-day trial version is available from PGP Corporation. However, there are other free encryption tools that you can tryout. Some are open source tools, which implies that anyone is free to modify and distribute the program.