Email Isn’t Always Secure (but It Can Be)

Usually, it’s good advice to keep sensitive and private information away from email. If you need to share confidential business information with a colleague, there are typically more secure ways to send that data off. However, email can be a secure messaging platform, so long as it’s set up correctly ahead of time.

Why is email usually not secure?

The reason most cybersecurity advice strongly encourages you not to share confidential work information over email is because email is, traditionally, not encrypted as it passes from your email server to your recipient’s. As such, these messages are sent without much protection, and stored in plain text.

While you would typically think someone without access to your email credentials wouldn’t be able to read your emails, if a bad actor compromises the network in any way, it would not be difficult for them to read any and all messages sent—including the ones that have sensitive business information.

It’s the same reason SMS is not a secure messaging platform: The lack of encryption means the messages are very easy to intercept. Normal email is fine for typical business correspondence, but when it comes to sending information you need to keep private, it isn’t the most secure method.

Email can be more secure

If you want or need to send important business information over email, the best thing to do is to encrypt your message before sending. This is often overlooked, since most email is not encrypted by default, but it isn’t hard to do, and it can protect your messages while still offer the convenience of traditional email.

Outlook, for example, allows you to encrypt your email. There are many different ways to set this up, but for Microsoft 365, it’s simple:

Start a new email, then click Options, choose Encrypt, then choose the encryption type you want to use from the list. To encrypt all outgoing emails, click File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings. From here, look for the Email Security tab, then choose Encrypt contents and attachments for outgoing messages.