is the e-mail a safe and secure method of communicating?

Question

do you need to build an architecture to make it safe ? can someone access my e-mail account [free given by a vortal] midway or at the source cracking my login and password.

Answer 1

Of course it's safe...only time it can't be safe it you have a very bad virus and has keyloggers or something...

But I wouldn't worry about that too much unless you download alot of porn or illegal software.

But Yahoo, MSN, google are all very secure and nobody can steal any information or read any e-mails in your inbox.

Answer 2

Email is inherently insecure. Your message is stored in plain text on disk on every server that it goes through, and usually it's quite a few. Many people can get access to your mail. In this sense it's really analogous to sending postcards. The only way to make email secure is to use encryption. There are two major standards for that: PGP and S/MIME. PGP is easier, and something like Thunderbird with Enigmail make it trivial. With S/MIME you need to get a certificate from some company (Certificate Authority), and that usually costs money.

Answer 3

your login and password ensure that one a mail reaches your mail server, your mail server will use the same to authenticate that only you get access to the same.
It does not imply that the message will not be intercepted while in transit. Most emails are sent unencrypted simply because the volume of emails will overwhelm a snooper. If however, a snopper had sufficiently large amount of resouces (memory, computation power, storage), your mail is pretty much insecure.
I am a bit tied up right now, but why dont you google to see if you find mail servers that guarantee encryption for sending emails

Answer 4

Secure email ... isn't happening. Here's a funny blog entry from a senior Google employee...
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/why-isnt-email-authenticated/

Now, Linux-type geeks have had secure email for about ten years. It's called PGP (or GPG)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gpg

A realistic security analysis depends on how important what you're transmitting is, and who the "bad guys" are who might want it. You can get better email accounts, and you can communicate by ways other than email.