It's too bad this refers to SSL. There are sometimes good reasons not to use SSL, but there is rarely a good reason to send emails that contain any business, fi

It's too bad this refers to SSL. There are sometimes good reasons not to use SSL, but there is rarely a good reason to send emails that contain any business, financial or security information over plaintext. Anyone who gets mails that amount to more than "Hey what's up man" should provide you with a public key for mail crypto. Also, it is very smart to use full-disk encryption and also encrypt sensitive info on that disk in a separate encrypted file (often preferably with something like TrueCrypt that allows plausible deniability via hidden volumes) if your computer is used for anything important. Think of the extent of damage that would have hit HBGary or any of the many other companies that have found themselves in a similar quagmire if they had employed some of that computer security knowledge to encrypt mail and required digital signatures before doing anything important (hint: the answer is 0). You may have a competitor hooked into your mail server for years before you know anything has happened, while you scratch your heads and wonder why they always beat you to the punch on new products and steal your big clients. You may have a hostile government agency after you for completely innocuous things, like downloading public domain research article. In this case, lots of encryption is going to buy your lawyers lots of time even if the judge eventually orders you to decrypt all of it; hopefully the real goods are hidden somewhere where they won't find them (like in a TC hidden volume, perhaps "in the cloud" in an encrypted file on Tahoe-LAFS over I2P).