If you don’t encrypt the data that you transmit via email, then you run the risk of having somebody else read what you sent. Data transmitted over the Internet are not private or secure, and these data can actually be stored in servers and unearthed again after a long time has passed. Thanks to email encryption, though, you can prevent this from happening.
Email encryption is a method of data compression that changes your files into a format that is inaccessible to unauthorized persons. This is done to make sure that confidential and sensitive data transmitted over the Internet will not be read by a third party. If you want to do more than just email encryption, you can also apply encryption to an entire volume or drive. To make use of the drive, you need a special decryption key. Once you have finished accessing files in the drive, it then returns to its encrypted state, making it unreadable by spyware, Trojan horses, or snoops.
Email encryption and other encryption schemes may be symmetric or asymmetric. Symmetric key algorithms include AES and DES, and Blowfish. These algorithms work with only one key that the sender and receiver share. This key serves to encrypt and decrypt text. Asymmetric encryption schemes, on the other hand, use a pair of keys, a public key, and a private key. The public key can be posted online so that senders can use this for email encryption. Once data have been encrypted, they can only be decrypted by the person who has the private key. Asymmetric email encryption is considered more secure because the decryption key may be kept private.