Email Marketing Encryption - What to Expect Over the Next 5 Years

<p>Encryption technology has come a long way since its use solely as a military application to secure communications but it is still not used as widely as it should be. Encryption is very important on the internet whether it is for transacting with some website or whether you are trying to send confidential information. There are different technologies that are available for this purpose. SSL is one of the most popular standards that are used in authentication while there are also methods like cryptography. Cryptography is one of the most important. It had some curious beginnings as well. Nearly ten years ago, the US military was using the internet to send information using one of the most complicated mathematics-based cryptography in software that we all know now as PGP. This software was then released to the world in the form that we currently know it as and is a mainstay of client to client communications. Mail communications whether offline or online are quite secure now because of these methodologies. But what does this mean for email marketing. Just like any other sender of email. An email marketer would like secure communications to the recipient. However, since one cannot expect their clients to have PGP based software, the best that an email marketer can do is invest in technology to secure server to server communications, as is the case today.</p><p>Since there has been no fuss in the past few years about encryption technology in email, does this mean that this is the end of the evolution of the technology. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of all invention and this is not different for email encryption. Hackers are always trying to get one step ahead; though they suffered a huge setback with the advent of encryption, they are poised to make a huge comeback. This can have major ramifications for email marketing because an entire business model could be destroyed because of it. Email marketers guarantee the security of client data but this is the first thing that a hacker is looking for. Imaging a hacker getting a hold of an online receipt sent to a client email address because of weak security between servers.</p><p>The threat from hackers today lies in the fact that quantum computers are available. These are very powerful computing machines that can crack the algorithms of encryption software. If this technology ever is used for the wrong purposes, woe betide everyone who uses email. This cure lies in developing more robust and new encryption technology. Most of these are in the planning and plotting stages. As one can imagine, the secrecy surrounding the development of these is near impossible to breach and therefore, getting updates is quite difficult. All that one can say is the email marketing proponents need to keep abreast of these developments because being the pioneer is using the most advanced technology is the key to business success.</p><p>Jamie j Colbs is a best practices activist and advocate for Benchmark Email ( <a target="_new" href="http://www.benchmarkemail.com/email-marketing/html-email-templates" rel="nofollow">http://www.benchmarkemail.com/email-marketing/html-email-templates</a> ), a leading Web and permission-based html email newsletter service and provider of <a target="_new" href="http://www.benchmarkemail.com/resources/Free-HTML-Email-Templates" rel="nofollow">free html email templates</a>.</p>