E-mail security

[douggym]

Is there any way of ensuring that the e-mails I send can only be read by the e-mail address to which I send them? Is it possible that someone could intercept the e-mails and read them? How could I tell if the 'wrong' person is getting them?

[fo3nix]

As birdie says, what you want is a form of Public Key encryption. One such program is PGP, but the free version is a little limited. A free (as in speech, too) implementation is called GnuPG. This is a good version of it for windows, and totally free. The receiver also needs to have it.

You each have your own public and private keys, and then you encypt your email message with their public key. Now only they can read it, which they need their private key for. No government agency can read it. No clever cracker. No-one.