Does Email Encryption Protect Against Spam?
Email encryption is often touted as a means of combating spam. However, encryption alone is not much help in the fight against spam because of the way modern cryptographic protocols use public key encryption. In fact, encryption could conceivably worsen the amount of dangerous spam that gets past a spam filter if the filter cannot decrypt a message and examine its contents. To be useful, encryption must be used in combination with a closely related technology – authentication. Fortunately, all major public key encryption solutions support encryption and authentication. In a nutshell, the basic idea behind public key encryption is that every user has both a public and private key, which are created together. The public key is shared with anyone else with whom one wishes to exchange secure emails. The point is; the sender uses the recipient’s public key to encrypt data, which can then only be decrypted by that recipient’s private key. Since the public key is, by definition, public, a spa
