Encryption is ubiquitous on the Internet and is necessary to protect your privacy and insure the security of your information.  Three areas it is commonly used here, on the web server when you connect to one of our web pages with a web browser, on shell servers, when you connect in with ssh, and on our mail servers when you use pop3, imap4, or smtp to receive or send e-mail.

     Because hackers, mathematicians, and government and corporate spies all are continuously working at ways to circumvent encryption to gain access to your credit card information, browser history and content, e-mail history and content, health information, etc, encryption is an ongoing evolutionary process where by old compromised methods and protocols are retired and new, more secure, protocols are added to replace them.

     The recent upgrade of some of our servers to Ubuntu 20.04 has resulted in problems with e-mail for customers using operating systems past the end of life.  All versions of Windows prior to Windows 8 are now at end of life and are no longer maintained and thus are vulnerable to hackers, viruses, and so forth even more so than maintained Windows versions.  The same is true for all versions of MacOS prior to High Sierra, and all versions of Ubuntu Linux prior to 16.04LTS.

     There are solutions and there are workarounds.  The solution of course is to upgrade to the most recent release, Windows 10, MacOS High Sierra, or Ubuntu 20.04 for example.

     The workarounds are to use third party software that is up to date even though the operating system is not, for example Thunderbird for e-mail, Firefox, Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, or Edge for a web browser, and a third party ssh package such as openssh or putty that is up to date.

     With e-mail you can also turn off TLS and allow mail and your usernames and passwords to transverse the Internet in plain-text.  There is not much advantage to using a weak encryption algorithm verses plain-text except perhaps for a false sense of security.  You can rest assured in either case that all your data will be backed up at the big NSA data center in Utah.