I bet that email is the tool you use most every day to keep up with what's going with your friends, to keep up with your boss, to keep up with the latest news, to retrieve passwords and to almost everything.
However this tool is far from being perfect. Most email providers don't give you all the tools they should and this makes you search somewhere else. What features do most emails miss? Encryption, compression, instant search, etc.
Encryption is by far the most need and useful tool of all. Did you know all the mail you send is permanently achieve on many email providers so they have proof against you if they need? Did you know some countries demand a copy of every email sent to be scanned by their super computers to see and learn more about you to see if you can be a potential threat to your country and to the world? Did you know that all the mail you send goes through many computers and networks before reaching it's destiny? I don't want to scare you but before your friend opens your mail hundreds of other already did it. To protect all your messages you should use a very powerful encryption algorithm. This does not means you can send messages like "let's bomb this place tomorrow". Not at all. It's only to keep your secrets secret. That's all.
What programs can you use? Most people rely on PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) to keep their secrets. This program has good reputation but won't keep a good government from successfully open your encrypted mail and reading the content. A better solution would be Winzip. It can be directly integrated with many email clients and it also can zip and email any file directly without needing to open the client first. Zip the content you want to make private then send it to your friend. How to make sure that only your friend has the password? You should give in hand the password to your friend in a PEN encrypted and that can only be opened with a key file do there are no passwords to be remembered here. Then your friend opens the PEN and copies the password to open the encrypted mail. The longer the password the better it is. Using the latest encryption algorithm won't make a difference if the password is very small. Pico Zip is a free program that will recover any Winzip password with enough time and a good way for you to see how good your pass is and how many combinations it has.
Use some javascript to generate the password for you. On Google you can get some sites that will generate passwords with millions of characters. Don't think twice and always use one of these to make your passwords!
To compress your mails to make them smaller you should not use Winzip. Sure it has good reputation and it's a very good program but if you want something totally effective you should use 7-Zip. This software is free and will compress all your text files up to 90%. This makes sending big messages very easy. Supports encryption as well. Too bad it cannot be integrated with most programs.
Finally to search all your mail instantly you can use Google Desktop or Windows Vista default search tool. Copernic Desktop search is a great option as well. Don't rely on online email search tools. They are too slow to be real effective!
