A few weeks ago it was reported that hackers got into Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! mailbox and read and published the contents of her mailbox. The media covered the story for a few days, and moved on to juicier Palin stories. The problem with free webmail services is that the contents of your messages is only as secure as the strength of your password and the competence of the provider to block hackers from their servers. With cloud computing, which is heavily used by free webmail providers, your data can be on multiple servers at any given time, so even if your password is secure and hackers are stopped dead cold, there is always the chance that an internal operations flaw or human error will expose your Emails to the world.

Webmail is very convenient, but this convenience comes at a price. If you still choose to place your private Email messages on a public mail system, I strongly recommend you encrypt the contents of your Email. If your messages are encrypted, even if your mailbox is compromised and someone gains access to your messages, they wont be able to read them. There are free open source tools such as GnuPG or commercial software such as PGP.

Encrypting your webmail is definitely a Privacy 2.0 way to protect yourself from having your identity and private information stolen.