E-mail reality: it's convenient and fast, but not private.(technology today)

One old saw about newfangled e-mail is that it's as private as a postcard. Problem is many people feel it's as secure as Registered Mail.

Two recent events shed interesting, and useful, light on the issues surrounding email security.

A new study by Forrester Research, commissioned by e-mail security provider Proofpoint (www.proofpoint.com), found that 41 percent of companies with 20,000 or more workers pay employees to manually read or automatically analyze the e-mails sent by other employees.

These companies are looking for instances of confidential data being leaked, either purposely or inadvertently, to those outside the company.

Such snooping is perfectly legal, with U.S. courts ruling that …