E-mail and the Internet
Internet, before the World Wide Web (Yes it existed even then) was mainly a
way for exchanging short messages between (computer science)
students, Computer Scientists and Computer Professionals.
These people devised a simple way to exchange the
information. They send the information as plain text.
What plain text E-mail means to you
Suppose someone is capturing all the traffic between two computers [2 computers?,why
capture?]
Plain text E-mail means that if someone captures the data being send from
your computer to your mailserver of from your mail-server to another
Footnotes
Message transfer between computers
If you send an E-mail. The messages flows from your computer (PC) to your
mail-server. Your mail server sends the
message to another mail server that can find the person you are sending the
mail to. That computer send the mail to the other persons mail server. And
finaly the user reads the message from his mail server (when the message is
transmitted to his own PC). That is at least 5 network transfers. At each
of these transfer, the message can be 'copied' from the network.
Why capture network information
Why would anyone capture network traffic? There are ofcourse, lots of
reasons. The most positive is that there is (or was) a network problem and
the networkadministrator is trying to find the cause by checking what gets
transmitted over the net. While doing so he stumbles upon your E-mail,
accidentaly reads a few sentences and gets interested. (Hey, after all, the
E-mails that you don't want read are usually the most interesting to a
nosy person).
And then ofcourse there are the hackers. These people monitor the
network to try and capture usefull information with which a system can be
broken in to.
