Is encryption absolutely necessary?
No, it isn’t; but it is a good idea to encrypt you data. Would you send a postcard with your personal data openly visible. A message that hasn’t been encrypted travels “in plain” and you don’t need a brilliant computer scientist to intercept your mail and read it or change its content. Autistici/Inventati provides both an online encryption system (https instead of http, whereby ‘s’ means ‘secure’) and the encrypted protocols IMAP-SSL and POP3-SSL for downloading your mail. These system do not grant total security, which can only be afforded by encrypting your mail with GPG. To learn more, read our howto about privacy.
