Security of email over WiFi hotspots

I am going to Europe, and I plan to connected to Internet there with my laptop via various open WiFi and WiFi hotspots. It is my understanding that when you connect like that, the owner of the WiFi has an ability to read everything that goes through it. Right now I use standard POP3 and SMTP. I really don't want to jeopardize the information that I send and receive via email (including email addresses of people that I email with as well as my own email address). Is there anything I can do to secure my email?

Also, I was told that when I use HTTPS pages, no information that I submit or receive can be viewed by the WiFi owner. Is that true?

What about FTP? Will it be safe to download/upload files with CuteFTP or login/password information is going to be jeopardized?

 

Hi alosito,
Not only can the owner of the WiFi hotspot see/read all the un-encrypted data (email,passwords, anything) anyone who is within range(300ft) can see it as well. In fact the owner is not who you should worry about, but the hackers or anyone phishing for valuble data.

If you want to secure your email, you need to encrypt it with PGP or another encryption program. Anything done on an HTTPS page is secure, so no need to worry there, but don't be entering account logins or passwords on an unsecure or unencrypted page.
Same thing goes for FTP, any login,password or data that is unencrypted or goes over a non-HTTPS is easily visible with simple free shareware programs.

Jack

The color of justice in america is green.
http://pbase.com/joneill

 

Thank you for your reply. Sorry, I don't know what PGP is. Will all my addressees be able to read the email that I send them without installing any additional programs? What about the email that they send me? Can I retrive it from the server and not jeopardize the data?

 

PGP:

http://www.pgp.com/products/freeware.html

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Yeah - FTP & TELNET and similar old networking tools are completely insecure, unencoded and unprotected and tho' pgp protects the email *content* it does nothing to protect your POP of SMTP server login which you should look into. Unless your email server uses something like SSL someone could steal access to your email server. The simple solution is to use some form of web mail over an https: connection.

I'd personally use SSH (or openSSH) to my home server then forward from there, and this is available free for on Windoze(under Cygwin) but that's a bit of work. ssh and scp etc encode and can optionally compress the entire tcp data stream.

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by stevea