What is email encryption and what types are there?

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5 practical reasons why every company should care about email encryption
Encoding the contents of sensitive emails prevents information leakage. Therefore, even if a threat actor gets hold of key details, email encryption does not allow them to decode, understand, and misuse them to attempt malicious activities. Additionally, encrypted emails no longer require special encryption software, as cloud-based interfaces are more readily available and offer greater efficiency.

The increase in the number of phishing attacks, data breaches, BEC scams, and other types of cybercrimes has fueled the need for businesses, government agencies, and individuals to exchange encrypted emails. Considering the rapidly growing cyber threats, regulators around the world have laid down stringent regulations, including email encryption. Both these factors are driving companies and individuals to adopt security measures to protect the contents of emails, and hence the global email encryption market size is expected to surge to. However, small and medium-sized businesses are still lagging behind and have not kept up with the cybersecurity trends, making themselves easy favorite targets for professional scammers. We at SecurityGateway are educating organizations and individuals on the seriousness and urgency of putting cybersecurity protocols and technologies in place. Let’s discuss 5 practical reasons why every company should focus on email encryption, regardless of its size and operational style.

What is Email Encryption?
Email encryption is an email security process that prevents hackers and other unauthorized persons from reading the contents of emails you send by arranging the messages into an unintelligible format. The encrypted emails can then only be decoded on the desired recipient's end. Emails are the backbone of corporate communication, which means a large amount of sensitive and confidential company information as well as personally identifiable data is exchanged via email every day. Data breaches are a common threat to email communications, resulting in devastating breaches of company data, files, financial information, and even employee details. This makes email encryption a viable method of protecting email data.

Most major email providers support email encryption. For example, Gmail will only send phone number data
and receive encrypted emails if the other email provider supports TLS encryption.

Email encryption can be done with the help of a variety of encryption methods and protocols. The process can be automatic, where all outgoing email traffic is encrypted, or manual, where only specific emails containing sensitive information or personally identifiable information (PII) are encrypted.

Email encryption can be facilitated by installing encryption software on your device, but more recently there are cloud-based hosted solutions and platforms that facilitate email encryption without requiring you to install any applications on your operating system or device. Read about that. There are two main email encryption methods used by encryption protocols:

In this case, the encryption key and the decryption key are the same. While this is a very simple approach, it is often challenging to securely share keys between an email sender and an email receiver without compromising the privacy of the information.

This is a more secure alternative to symmetric encryption methods as it requires different keys for encryption and decryption. A key pair contains a public key and a private key, where the public key is accessible to everyone but the private key can only be used by the key owner to decrypt the message.