Concerned About Email Privacy? Is Encrypting the Answer?

If you are concerned about email privacy (you probably should be – at least on some level) then you may have already heard about or explored email encryption options. If you haven’t read about email encryption at all, this article from the New York Times is a great introductory read. Email is such an essential and valuable tool for businesses today, and often contains sensitive and personal information pertaining both to your company and your customers.

Ensuring the safe delivery of transactional emails, receipt emails, sales emails and even marketing emails that could have sensitive corporate material is an important step in any email campaign. Encryption tools such as the one the above article is discussing, Virtru, are taking steps to ensure email safely reaches its intended target, and only its intended target.

How’s Email Encryption Working?

Email encryption tools are fortunately getting easier to utilize in everyday work, in the form of downloadable application and browser plug-ins. These applications scramble your emails and then send them to the recipient who then needs a key to decode the message. Virtru even allows you to disable forwarding or, if you are feeling a bit Mission Impossible-y, set the message to self-destruct after a certain amount of time (ok, I think they say “expire” but self-destruct makes it more exciting).

Another great aspect of many of these encryption services is that they are either one-off or allow you to select which messages you want to encrypt. Many emails do not require the added step of encryption, and when the recipient doesn’t have the same application, decrypting a message that isn’t sensitive could easily become tiresome.

With a strong desire for more secure communication, applications like Virtru will likely have a fairly sizeable impact in the business world moving forward. Corporate IT security breaches are far too risky and costly. As long as these applications continue to make it easier to encrypt and secure messages, there really is little reason to not consider using them. 

Jonathon Mahon is a content marketer, writer and designer based in Boston. He writes for various digital publications and blogs specializing in the cloud, email automation, software, and technology.