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The Quest for a Secure e-Mail Solution

Industry analysts report that during 2007 the average user each day sent over 35 e-mails and received almost 115 e-mails. This translates to a heavy average 20 MB of e-mail data.. About forty percent of business-to-business invoices among companies are electronic and delivered via e-mail, impacting a volume of at least $2 billion in revenue on a global scale. The worldwide installed base of ISP/Webmail accounts is expected to reach over 970 million mail boxes by 2008, up from 690 million in2004. Over 80% of e-mail users experienced last year some form of virus-related accident on their PCs. That originates from over 200 virus encounters for every 1,000 machines each month, causing on average one virus infection per PC every two months.

With over 20 billion messages exchanged each day globally, e-mail is currently the prime avenue for the delivery of business and personal information over the Internet. Despite the public relevance of this impressive volume of traffic, corporations and end users are still at a loss when facing the problem of e-mail trading of confidential information. In fact, just as anyone can read the contents of a freely circulated postcard, a variety of techniques and tools allow anybody to easily identify and extract information from e-mail messages transferred in clear through the Internet. Until recently, the widespread use of encryption for securing e-mails has been hampered by both technological and legislation barriers. However, the advent of desktop high-performance computers and of new legislation freeing the use of strong encryption and mandating privacy has now made the use of encryption both feasible and necessary. In fact, the need for a secure e-mail solution has become even more evident with recent USA and EU regulations. For example, the HIPAA and similar European privacy regulations demand the protection of sensitive patient, client or citizen information. Laws governing the financial sector, such as SEC, NASD and Gramm-Leach Bliley require secure archival of e-mail messages. Similarly, Sarbanes-Oxley mandates strong internal controls, which include the ability to secure e-mail communications and restrict access to certain information.

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