Certified Email
Certified Email
When you get a letter in an envelope, what can you say for sure?
- Are you sure that the recipient address in the lower right corner of the envelope is your address?
- Are you sure that the sender address in the upper left corner of the envelope is correct?
- Are you sure that the sender even exists?
- Are you sure that the content of the envelope is what the sender put in it?
Not surprisingly, the answer is NO to all these questions. Some one may have put the envelope in your mailbox, even if the recipient written on it is different, or may be not even exists. The sender address can be wrong, the name of the sender can be anything. Last but not least, someone may have read the content of the letter, or may have replaced it with something else.
What instead you may find surprising is that exactly the same is true for emails!. It's the easiest thing ever to send an email with a fake sender address, or to have an email delivered to someone even if the recipient address is different, for example. There is no hacking involved. This is just how emails work. Nobody ever said that the email protocol guarantees this kind of correctness in the information they convey.
The good news is that almost all this issues can be solved by digitally signing your emails.
