Email Content Protection

Email is quite consistently sent in clear text. Emails work their way through many machines to reach the destination. At any point someone could possibly intercept the email and read its contents.

There are solutions to this problem such as Pretty Good Privacy protection. Many popular email programs can integrate with such protection. There is PGP for BeOS and it even integrates with BeMail, to some extent. Also, the Mail Daemon Replacement program can use filters and such. There could possibly be an encryption filter.

In any case, the email system should support encryption via some (hopefully universal) mechanism. Such a mechanism should not impose an undue burden on the user in terms of setup or interface.

Email Address Protection

Email address protection could apply either to one's address book or to one's own email address. More people are probably most concerned with controlling the release of their own email address. This is in most cases an ISP problem since ISPs regularly restrict the amount of email addresses that a person can have and make it difficult to create and remove email addresses on the fly. It also makes it difficult (or impossible) to create one-time email addresses, which are useful for anonymous transactions.