Electronic mail is an indispensable communications tool.
Like the fax, e-mail seemed to appear in the business world virtually overnight. As e-mail has become commonplace, people have come to rely on it to transmit information of all kinds. If you need to get those quarterly numbers to the sales force out in the field, you can send them in the blink of an eye, for pennies. When you fire off a message to someone over the Internet, that message is delivered as plain text. Every Internet server, Internet service provider, or mail computer that touches your message while it's being delivered could potentially copy, reroute, or modify its contents.