How do I keep my email address private?
Your email address is a lot like your phone number: Unless you share it with others or have it listed in a public directory, it will not be available to unauthorized people. Be sure to give your email address only to trusted parties. Remember, anyone you send email to will know your email address.

Can my email be read by unauthorized people?
If a web site asks for your email address, you should check the site's privacy policy. The privacy policy should tell you whether your email address will be shared with others. (For an example, see Netscape's privacy policy). People who send spam (junk email) often pick up email addresses from newsgroups. If you participate in newsgroups, particularly Usenet newsgroups, you should be aware that you may be sharing your email address with spam emailers.


How Can I Be Sure I'm Sending Secure Email?
Although you use a password to log on to your email application or ISP, the email server only recognizes your password - it doesn't check to make sure that the right person typed it in. And while in transit, your email is potentially visible to anyone outside your enterprise who might have access to your server or who gained clearance to your intranet. One solution is the S/MIME (Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) protocol, an industry standard supported by the latest email programs and web browsers, including Netscape Communicator. S/MIME incorporates digital certificates, the online passports that authenticate the identity of an email's sender and receiver, verify message integrity, and ensures the privacy of the message's content. It takes only a few minutes to obtain a digital certificate for securing your email.


Steps for Secure email
Plain email is not a secure medium. Messages can be read by people with authorized (or unauthorized) access to mail servers which handle the mail, unlikely though this might be. There are a few basic requirements for secure and private exchange of email:

privacy: nobody other than the intended recipient can read the message; authentication: we can be certain that the message comes from the person from whom it appears to come;
integrity: we know that a message hasn't been tampered with in transmission. Where privacy, authenticity and integrity of information sent is vital, users will look for ways of making their email secure. There are a number of tools and standards available for the secure and private exchange of email, though unfortunately they don't necessarily interoperate with each other. The most widely used is PGP while others include S/MIME and PEM/MOSS.