Do you know who's reading your e-mail? Millions of SMTP messages traverse the Internet each day, and much like ordinary postcards, they're completely readable by anyone along the way. Although trusted as a valid form of business communication, Internet mail offers little or no precaution against tampering.

Through the magic of public key cryptography, protocols like PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and S/MIME let users cloak their messages in a digital veil of privacy. To be successful, however, secure messaging products must hide the complexities of PKI (public key infrastructures) and trust models from the user. We found that Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook Express (Internet Explorer 4.0) does the best job of presenting S/MIME to the user in a (relatively) clear and simple way. By the same token, Netscape Communications Corp.'s Communicator 4.04 deserves an honorable mention as an excellent user-oriented secure messaging tool.

Finally, we were impressed with the management features of the latest incarnation of the rival PGP standard, by Network Associates. Critical to enterprise deployment, PGP goes above and beyond the call of duty by delivering powerful policy management features, corporate key servers and SMTP-based policy enforcement agents.

Outlook Express (Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0), free,
Microsoft Corp.,
(425) 882-8080.
www.microsoft.com/ie