Your e-mails are as public as postcards. When they are in transit anyone can read and copy them. They can intercept your e-mails and extract marketing or security information from them very very easily. This is because when they are transmitted over the internet from one person to another they are sent as unencrypted character streams. Anyone can view these streams and read your text.

If you want to keep your e-mails private then you need to a system which encrypts the characters streams as they pass over the internet. One popular method is something called public key encryption. There are many ways you can get a hold of this, either by downloading PGP (or GPG) add-ons for one of the the many e-mail clients available (Outlook, Thunderbird etc) OR by using a secure web-mail system such as hushmail.

If you want to have a go with secure web-mail then go to

hushmail

and register for free. It's simple to set up and easy to use.

I would recommend it for anyone who believes that our right to privacy is being seriously undermined by certain authorities.