Email is an electronic postcard. Everybody involved in the delivery of email can read the content, if the mail is not encrypted. For example, mail in your income mailbox is a collection of text files and can be opened with every text editor. Because of the importance of mail, these files are often backed up and stored for years. This was the pitfall for Bill Gates, his "secret" emails lead to the Microsoft monopoly conviction.

Public mailserver like Hotmail, Yahoo mail etc. insert advertising for their financial revenue according to your user profile. They are prone to Hacker attacks. Your mail is stored on their servers and you have no control, how your sensitive data are handled or deleted. We could not find a statement at these sites, that email on member accounts are not screened, or how mail is stored and finally deleted.

Because of this situation and the sensitive nature of mail to members of the Tumor Registry we decided not to accept email addresses from these servers.

How to make email secure

The only way to protect email content is to use encryption before the mail is sent. Your mail is still accessible by the host of your account or sniffers along its way to the Internet. When opened in a text editor however, only "cryptic" signs can be seen.
The most popular encryption software is Pretty Good Privacy and free for individual users. It uses the same public/private encryption method as the SSL protocoll.

You can download PGP from the MIT if you live in the US or Canada. All other visitors should go to www.pgpi.com to get the software.