Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are collaborating to improve email encryptionMumbai, Mar 20(AZINS) Email has been around for decades now, and you probably use it on at least a semi-regular basis, whether for work, personal conversations, or online shopping. So you'd think that emails are secure, considering the details we're divulging to someone who could intercept it, but it turns out that's not the case. Thankfully, the Internet Task Force (ITF) is currently attempting to remedy that.

Most email is sent in unencrypted test using Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), which is old itself. This means that, a capable hacker can insert himself into the process and intercept the email, telling the sender's browser that no SSL encryption is active. SSL provides a secure link between the browser and the web server which, if nullified, means the email is sent unencrypted, with no indication of it either. And since it has no encryption of its own, that's really all the work that's needed.

The new proposal put forth by the ITF has been co-written by engineers from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Comcast, and 1&1 Mail & Media Development. The idea is to protect against vulnerabilities caused by existing methods of breaking down SSL encryption on emails. How this works is that, when an email is sent to a server that supports the new format, SMTP Strict Transport Security (STS), the sender will automatically check the encryption support and certifications before sending. If that check fails, the email should cease sending and the sender should be notified of the reason.

According to Google's report, TLS encryption, which was developed and launched years ago, is already widely in use, with 83 percent of messages sent from Gmail and 70 percent of emails sent to it in the last year using this encryption. Unfortunately, a number of possible hiccups along the way could mean that those encrypted emails are reverted to plain text with no way for the sender to know.

Just to clarify, this is only a proposal at the moment, so it's going to take a lot of work before email encryption gets any better. Until then, you can check out the details of the proposal here.