If you don’t use Microsoft Outlook, you should probably consider opening up an account. After promising not to read our emails anymore, Microsoft is adding encryption layers to both outbound and inbound mail. Not only will Microsoft be unable to snoop, but the NSA won’t either.
In fact, Microsoft Security Vice President Matt Thomlinson flat out says that the new encryption methods are designed to keep the government out.
“We are in the midst of a comprehensive engineering effort to strengthen encryption across our networks and services,” Thomlinson said in a statement. “Our goal is to provide even greater protection for data across all the great Microsoft services you use and depend on every day. This effort also helps us reinforce that governments use appropriate legal processes, not technical brute force, if they want access to that data.”
Thomlinson said “Outlook.com is now further protected by Transport Layer Security, or TLS, encryption for both outbound and inbound email.”
This means that all emails you send using Outlook will be encrypted and better protected as they travel between Microsoft and other email providers.
“Outlook.com has also enabled Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) encryption support for sending and receiving mail between email providers,” Thomlinson said. “Forward secrecy uses a different encryption key for every connection, making it more difficult for attackers to decrypt connections. OneDrive has now enabled PFS encryption support as well.”
In June, Google released a similar statement preaching the necessity of encrypted email, calling on other email providers to follow suit.
“The important thing is that both sides of an email exchange need to support encryption for it to work; Gmail can’t do it alone,” Google said.
With Microsoft and Google leading the charge, encrypted emails safe from prying eyes is becoming a reality.