Email Privacy

Email privacy deals with issues relating to the unauthorized access of electronic mails. Such unauthorized access or inspection of emails is likely to happen during the time the email is being sent or stored on mail servers or open in a user computer. Since more and more communications are taking place via emails, email privacy has grown into a key concern. The emails are sent through many potentially “untrusted” computers in transit. During their journey to their destination, you cannot realize if they have been intercepted by unauthorized entities. In this sense, it is very different from letters sealed in envelopes. In regular letters, you can understand when they have been tampered with or if the seal has been broke. But in emails, this is not possible. So, you need technological workarounds which will ensure that access to emails is next to impossible. Emails will also travel across national boundaries and different nations will have different regulations concerning who gets to read an email. This makes email privacy a rather complicated issue.