rockhillmanor wrote:
I've had my yahoo accounts hacked.
Gmail just announced yesterday theirs was hacked by some German company and there is a list of passwords posted on a website. :R
GMAIL's 5,000,000 compromised email accounts were not "hacked". But the result of harvesting through phishing scams or easily guessable passwords such as
password over time. If you fall for this, then who's fault is it? It still represents just over 1% of its user accounts.
By dot.com, if you mean a registrar? Then, yes, many offer at least one free email account. GoDaddy does. But registrars have also been subject to hacking and compromises. I would not consider it to be any more secure.
Most all free email providers now use some type of SSL encryption for email sessions/transport. It gets decrypted on the email server end. And may remain that way until it reaches the recipient's email server, then encrypted again for delivery.
If both parties are using the same email provider such as GMAIL, then email can remain encrypted to/from the email server.
If I'm not mistaken, this is what the OP is concerned about when referencing using Public WiFi. Assuming that the email server is properly configured, then no one will be able to read your email during the SSL "transport" phase.
If you have sensitive info in an email, then use some type of encryption for the message portion, and give the recipient the keys to decrypt it in advance.
