Chapter 18
Security Review

These are short reminders of top­ics cov­ered more ful­ly else­where in the book.

Secure Communication within the US

Use RMail Mes­sage-Lev­el encryp­tion or RMail email ser­vice (RMail Inbox, RMail Web, and RMail apps and plug-ins) to keep your mes­sages secure.

Use RMail Mes­sage-Lev­el encryp­tion for com­mu­ni­ca­tions that you don’t want the gov­ern­ment to see. This advice is not meant for ter­ror­ists. We hope the gov­ern­ment will be able to lis­ten in on what ter­ror­ists are say­ing with­out at the same time infring­ing on the rights of the rest of us. As good cit­i­zens, we are cer­tain­ly going to coöper­ate with the gov­ern­ment in pro­vid­ing the infor­ma­tion nec­es­sary to run our soci­ety in a rea­son­able and safe man­ner.

Accord­ing­ly, we pro­vide our Social Secu­ri­ty num­ber, when nec­es­sary, par­tic­i­pate in gov­ern­ment sur­veys (e.g., US Cen­sus), pay tax­es based on finan­cial infor­ma­tion, apply to receive gov­ern­ment ben­e­fits, such as Medicare and the like. Yet all cit­i­zens have a right to pri­va­cy regard­ing infor­ma­tion that’s not the government’s busi­ness. If the gov­ern­ment doesn’t need it for legit­i­mate pur­pos­es, you have a right to keep such infor­ma­tion to your­self.

And RMail can help you do so. Just the basic free RMail Inbox email ser­vice encrypts email mes­sages between your email pro­gram and the RMail Inbox email serv­er or even as far as the recipient’s email serv­er. The RMail email serv­er is locat­ed in Ger­many out­side the easy juris­dic­tion of US courts. RMail doesn’t data mine your mes­sages and sell the infor­ma­tion for com­mer­cial use. Final­ly, RMail pro­vides sev­er­al oth­er ser­vices that pro­vide addi­tion­al secu­ri­ty, such as RMail Mes­sage-Lev­el encryp­tion, which is com­plete secu­ri­ty from you to the recip­i­ent.

Secure Communication with Other Countries

Not all coun­tries are like the Unit­ed States where pro­tec­tion is built into the law and where it is ille­gal for peo­ple and the gov­ern­ment to breach your pri­va­cy. Con­se­quent­ly, when you’re com­mu­ni­cat­ing with peo­ple in oth­er coun­tries, secu­ri­ty is often very impor­tant to recip­i­ents even if it’s not impor­tant to you. Thus, RMail becomes a way that you can min­i­mize the chances of ongo­ing emails going back and forth between you and some­one in anoth­er coun­try being inter­cept­ed by such a recipient’s gov­ern­ment.

Since the for­eign cit­i­zen may not be aware of this, it is sen­si­ble for you to sug­gest that he or she get an RMail Inbox account. The alter­na­tive is to use RMail Mes­sage-Lev­el encryp­tion, which is more secure encryp­tion. Will ter­ror­ists use RMail? Of course they will. Will that give ter­ror­ists the secu­ri­ty they need for com­mu­ni­ca­tion in car­ry­ing out their crim­i­nal activ­i­ty? It will pro­vide them some secu­ri­ty that they wouldn’t oth­er­wise have, but antiter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions with sub­stan­tial resources with­in var­i­ous gov­ern­ments have ways of deal­ing with encrypt­ed email mes­sages. As I said before in this book, you can’t count on email being secure from the eyes of the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency (NSA). Most gov­ern­ments, how­ev­er, do not have the dig­i­tal horse­pow­er of America’s NSA and may be unable to decrypt email traf­fic.

Secure Communication In Your Office

Per­son­nel in many orga­ni­za­tions small and large use their email as a dual com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tem. They send email as busi­ness com­mu­ni­ca­tions to out­siders, and they send email as office mem­os to insid­ers. If the email is not secure, it’s sub­ject to easy hack­ing. What can you do that’s safe and con­ve­nient?

If all per­son­nel use RMail Inbox, in effect, RMail becomes the office memo sys­tem. Now you have secu­ri­ty for your office mem­os, and you have some secu­ri­ty for your nor­mal email to the out­side (encryp­tion to your email serv­er).

Secure Recipient Communication

It’s one thing to be dili­gent about using RMail Inbox your­self, but what about the recip­i­ent? If the recip­i­ent does not use RMail Inbox, there is a greater chance that some­one could inter­cept your email mes­sage. Why take the risk? Try to influ­ence your recip­i­ents to use RMail Inbox.

Nor­mal­ly, it would be the height of arro­gance to request that some­one else use your email ser­vice instead of theirs. In a case where there’s a lot at stake, how­ev­er, it’s dif­fer­ent. Any­one can get an RMail Inbox account free. There’s a rea­son why the recip­i­ent might com­ply with your request. The recip­i­ent might be your doc­tor, lawyer, accoun­tant, priest, busi­ness col­league, or finan­cial advis­er. Par­tic­u­lar­ly in a sit­u­a­tion where some­one is pro­vid­ing ser­vices to you, and you’re pay­ing for such ser­vices, you have a right to request they com­mu­ni­cate with you in a secure man­ner. So request.

In addi­tion, for some fam­i­lies it’s real­ly impor­tant to have secure email between the fam­i­ly mem­bers, such as for a fam­i­ly busi­ness, a fam­i­ly trust, or the like. In such a case, you might do your fam­i­ly a big favor by insist­ing that every­body use RMail Inbox.

Secure Your Email

Use RMail email ser­vices on your home or busi­ness net­work that you access via Wi-Fi or cable. The trans­mis­sion to your email serv­er will be encrypt­ed, even if you use slop­py router admin­is­tra­tion. Although I don’t rec­om­mend Gmail because Google data mines the email of its users, Gmail today is a secure email sys­tem. That is, it’s secure as far as the Gmail email serv­er. As men­tioned before, when a encrypt­ed email mes­sage is sent by a secure email serv­er to anoth­er secure email serv­er, it’s auto­mat­i­cal­ly encrypt­ed when it’s trans­mit­ted over the inter­net from email serv­er to email serv­er.

Con­se­quent­ly, when you use RMail Inbox to send an email to a Gmail user, the email goes encrypt­ed all the way. It’s a secure trans­mis­sion for the entire email path (except that Google does data min­ing). Going back to the Recip­i­ents sec­tion above, that means your request to a recip­i­ent to get secure email is not so pre­sump­tu­ous. A recip­i­ent has the choice of using Gmail as well as RMail.

Secure Your Personal Information

Today it’s tough to keep your per­son­al infor­ma­tion out of reach of com­mer­cial inter­ests. Large providers use your email, cloud stor­age, and oth­er such sources of data for their com­mer­cial pur­suits and to sell to oth­er busi­ness­es. In oth­er words, your data is avail­able to almost any­one. One way to avoid sur­ren­der­ing your email data to those that mine it is to use RMail Inbox. RMail does not data mine on its email servers, and such servers are in Ger­many beyond the reach of Amer­i­can lit­i­gants.

Secure Your Health Information

You can use RMail ser­vices to com­ply with HIPAA. This is not only impor­tant for health­care pro­fes­sion­als, but it is also impor­tant for you. If you are care­less in send­ing your health­care infor­ma­tion to peo­ple, wher­ev­er they are, you will not have much of a claim to a breach of secu­ri­ty should your health­care infor­ma­tion fall into the wrong hands. If you rou­tine­ly use RMail ser­vices to send such infor­ma­tion via email, your claim will be much stronger. Per­son­al­ly, I’m an old guy who doesn’t care much about who sees my health­care infor­ma­tion. But if you’re younger, and want to get health insur­ance, life insur­ance, a job, or a clear­ance to par­take in cer­tain activ­i­ties, keep­ing your health­care infor­ma­tion con­fi­den­tial is impor­tant to you.

Secure Forms and Signatures

Col­lect­ing infor­ma­tion by hav­ing oth­ers fill in forms is a time-hon­ored prac­tice in busi­ness and oth­er­wise. And the capa­bil­i­ty has been built into the web from the begin­ning. Whether it’s a sur­vey, the com­ple­tion of a con­tract, or the gath­er­ing of infor­ma­tion, dig­i­tal forms play a vital role in online activ­i­ty. The prob­lem is, how do you make this prac­tice secure but still con­ve­nient? After all, quite often the infor­ma­tion col­lect­ed by forms must be kept secure. RMail RSign is a solu­tion that pro­vides you with the capa­bil­i­ty to eas­i­ly use com­plex forms and keep the infor­ma­tion secure.

Get­ting sig­na­tures on dig­i­tal doc­u­ments via online trans­fer has been around for a long time, and it’s easy to find the capa­bil­i­ty to do so. The trick is to find a means of get­ting sig­na­tures that’s easy to use, con­ve­nient, inex­pen­sive, and secure. That’s where RMail E-sign is a good choice. And E-sign is part of the con­ve­nient pack­age of RMail ser­vices.

Home Network

Use RMail Inbox on your home net­work that you access via Wi-Fi or net­work cable. The trans­mis­sion to your email serv­er will be encrypt­ed even if you use slop­py router admin­is­tra­tion.

Secure the Message

Use RMail Mes­sage-Lev­el encryp­tion ser­vice for all sen­si­tive or high-val­ue com­mu­ni­ca­tions:

• In all per­son­al com­mu­ni­ca­tions of a sen­si­tive nature
• With clients to whom you owe a fidu­cia­ry duty for pri­va­cy
• For all health­care com­mu­ni­ca­tions
• For all finan­cial com­mu­ni­ca­tions
• For many types of busi­ness com­mu­ni­ca­tions

Registered Email

The RMail com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tem gives you the con­ve­nience to use Reg­is­tered Email. Reg­is­tered Email is far supe­ri­or to reg­is­tered mail. Reg­is­tered Email not only pro­vides proof of receipt by the recip­i­ent of your email but also pro­vides proof of con­tent. Plus, you can avoid the has­sle of pro­cess­ing and mail­ing phys­i­cal mail. With RMail Every­one gets a free account, albeit with lim­i­ta­tions. If you use Reg­is­tered Email heav­i­ly you’ll have to pay for. If you use it occa­sion­al­ly, it’s free. In the RMail soft­ware there is a but­ton you can click (tap) to send an email mes­sage Reg­is­tered Email. It couldn’t be eas­i­er.

Secure the Transfer of Large Files

Text doesn’t take up much dig­i­tal space. Even long doc­u­ments take only a few KBs, and one MB is a huge amount of text. If you nev­er use any­thing but dig­i­tal text, you don’t have to wor­ry about trans­fer­ring large dig­i­tal files via email. Yet, if you use and trans­fer images, audio bites, video clips, data­bas­es, com­plex com­put­ing mod­els, soft­ware, and the like via email, you need a means beyond the nor­mal email sys­tem to be sure of secu­ri­ty and deliv­ery. RMail Large­Mail file trans­fer pro­vides you with an easy-to-use and con­ve­nient means to do so. Secure­ly trans­fer­ring such assets and ensur­ing deliv­ery to those with whom you need to col­lab­o­rate or to cus­tomers, clients, co-work­ers, ven­dors, and gov­ern­ment agen­cies is a capa­bil­i­ty you don’t want to over­look.

Secure Public and Quasi-Public Networks

Use RMail email when your mobile device or com­put­er is con­nect­ed to an open pub­lic net­work via Wi-Fi. The trans­mis­sion to your email serv­er will be encrypt­ed. (See Chap­ter 19 for more infor­ma­tion.)

Use RMail email when your mobile device or com­put­er is con­nect­ed to a qua­si-pub­lic net­work via Wi-Fi that requires an eas­i­ly-obtain­able pass­word (e.g., a motel Wi-Fi ser­vice). The trans­mis­sion to your email serv­er will be encrypt­ed. . (See Chap­ter 19 for more infor­ma­tion.)

The End

OK, this is a redun­dant chap­ter. Noth­ing new here. But you can refer to this chap­ter when you need a quick reminder of solu­tions to secu­ri­ty issues.