How safe is your email?
With more than 2 million email messages sent every second and over two-thirds of EU citizens using email, it's one of the most widespread forms of communication in use today. However, not all email communications are necessarily as safe as you might think.
Our research has revealed that email providers often fail to apply appropriate security standards to protect their communications with other providers for the delivery and reception of emails.
So, are your email communications safe? The My Email Communications Security Assessment (MECSA) is an online tool that allows you to check whether your email provider offers a good level of protection in your email communications.
Simply submit your email address and reply to the email you will receive. MECSA will run some quick checks and come back with scores in three categories:
- Confidential delivery: this score assesses how well emails that you send and receive are protected from being read by third parties that could be listening to the communication channel or impersonating the recipient's email provider.
- Phishing and identity theft: this score measures the capacity of your provider to detect and prevent some forms of email identity theft (e.g. someone sending emails on your behalf)
- Integrity of messages: your email provider will score well here if they can detect modified messages, where the content received differs from content sent.
The goal of MECSA is to empower individuals in assessing the level of protection of their email communications and promote best practices among email providers.
The tool also collects anonymous statistics on the assessments carried out. These data helps scientists in analysing the state of play in the protection of email communications between providers.
MECSA is currently available in five languages - English, German, French, Spanish and Italian. The plan is to extend the tool to all EU languages this year.
Provided by European Commission Joint Research Centre