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138 Chapter 3 • Communication Security: Remote Access and Messaging

the department is found, the delivery person contacts the department to find where
the department’s mailroom is. Once in the mailroom, the delivery person places the
message in the recipient’s mailbox.To deliver the mail, several steps had to be taken
to locate the recipient.
In terms of e-mail, the process is more complicated. E-mail is broken into
smaller pieces of data called packets, and the packets are routed through numerous
devices called routers. Routers connect networks (or subnets) together and are used
to find the fastest route between two networks. Individual packets making up one
e-mail message may travel along different routes before reaching their destination,
where an e-mail server puts the packets back together in their original form using
sequencing information in the packet headers.
While this may seem like a long and arduous process, it actually takes very little
time.

NOTE
It is extremely important to encrypt your e-mail. Services like Hotmail,
Yahoo!, Gmail, and others reserve the right to view e-mail messages
stored in any accounts on which they are providing services at no
charge. Courts have upheld the rights of employers to monitor
employee e-mails, and public employees’ e-mail can be accessed by the
press under the Freedom of Information Act.

To protect yourself and your data, use encryption. Encryption scrambles the con-
tents of a message and its attachments, and then puts the contents back together on
the recipient’s end.Anyone attempting to view the data in between will be unable
to decipher the content. Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME)
and PGP are two excellent ways to protect e-mail. For the Security+ exam, you
need to understand both S/MIME and PGP. However, there are other e-mail
encryption products including HushMail (www.hushmail.com) and ShyFile (www.shy-
file.net) available.There are also companies who offer secure e-mail services, such as
SecureNym.

MIME

Before discussing S/MIME, its parent product, Multi-Purpose Internet Mail
Extensions (MIME) should be discussed. MIME is an extension of Simple Mail

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