Is my pop3 email security enough for a simple home user?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Tue, 05 Nov 2019 14:17:14 -0500, Paul Smith wrote:
>On Tue, 2019-11-05 at 19:37 +0100, Ralf Mardorf via ubuntu-users wrote:
>> On Tue, 5 Nov 2019 16:46:27 +0100, Liam Proven wrote:  
>> > On Tue, 5 Nov 2019 at 15:48, Charles IRONS wrote:  
>> > > Is my email secure enough? As an end user age 80 I am not skilled
>> > > with terminal commands."    
>> > 
>> > Absolutely, yes. Don't worry about it. Email is public while it is
>> > in transit, anyway.  
>
>That's not true (necessarily).  It depends on whether your connection
>goes over SSL/TLS or not.

Hi,

you are mistaken.

Even end-to-end encryption could suffer from either backdoors or if not
done by some obscure app end-to-end encryption, but done by the users
via gnupg, by not understanding all security measures. There are
security pitfalls such as Evolution's option "Alway encrypt to myself
when sending encrypted messages", but this is still another toppic.
However, TLS is prone to man-in-the-middle attacks (way more risky than
storing unencrypted mails on our own computers) and the mails are at
least temporarily stored unencrypted on the providers web server. Btw.
the full quote:

On Tue, 5 Nov 2019 16:46:27 +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
>You should consider email messages not to be letters, but postcards.
>Anyone who wishes can see your messages as they pass through your
                                         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>internet service provider's servers, and those of the recipient.
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Regards,
Ralf