Your e-mails contain a lot of important information that you don’t want others to know. There are potential threats that may access your e-mails if it is not secured appropriately. Information related to social security numbers, bank information, business transactions or record would be misused by anyone who gets unauthorized access to it. In such a situation encrypting your e-mail is an ideal way to safeguard it. Through encryption, you can prevent a malicious attempt of accessing or hijacking your e-mail content, account and attachments.What are to be encrypted?

If you want to secure your e-mail effectively you need to encrypt three things primarily: the connection from your e-mail provider, e-mail messages, stored, cached or archived email messages.

In case the connection of your email remains unencrypted, then other users using the same network can easily access the login credentials and the messages you send or receive while you check, send or receive messages. This concern crops up typically when you use a public network for example the Wi-Fi hotspot in a coffee shop.

Now let us see how your actual e-mail messages are targeted. The messages become vulnerable when they travel via the internet typically when they depart from the server of email provider. By encrypting these messages before you send them, you make them unreadable during the transit or till the time when they are opened by the recipient.

Now lets discuss about why we require encrypting our saved messages. In case you leave your saved or backed up messages on your computer or mobile device, they can be accessed by hackers irrespective of the fact that e-mail programs are password protected. By encrypting these saved or archived messages you render them unreadable for unauthorized entrants.

How to encrypt e-mail connections?

The e-mail connection between the e-mail service provider and the computer or mobile device can be secured through encryption. For encrypting the connection you have to setup Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption. This is the same security provision that you are provided for checking your bank account or making online transactions like payment or fund transfer.

So next time when you are about to check e-mail on a desktop, laptop or tablet don’t forget to ensure that it is SSL/TLS encrypted. The URL of a SSL/TLS encrypted website always starts with ‘https’ instead of http. Make sure that it is ‘https’ and if you don’t see it while logging in your Web-based e-mail then type an ‘s’ at the end of ‘http’ and press ‘Enter.’ This will prompt to encrypt your e-mail connection if your service provider supports SSL/TLS.

Moreover, you are advised to activate encryption through account settings so that your future logins remain encrypted. You should also create or modify bookmarks or shortcuts to your email site with the use of 'https' address.