Keeping email safe from prying eyes is a joint effort, with both the sender and receiver needing to implement encryption technology. And Facebook -- which sends its user base billions of notification emails every day -- says things have gotten significantly more secure because of changes made by popular webmail providers such as Microsoft and Yahoo.
The percentage of emails sent from Facebook that are received by webmail providers which support encryption has jumped from less than 30 percent in May to 95 percent by mid-July, according to a Facebook blog post published Tuesday.
The change comes amid a growing effort by webmail providers to better support encrypted email. That's a reaction to National Security Agency snooping revealed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden, and it's a necessity at Facebook, where notification emails about posts and comments made by users' friends often contain snippets of private or semi-private content from the site.
The kind of basic webmail encryption Facebook refers to in its blog post is provided by a technology called STARTTLS, which uses Transport Layer Security encryption to make it harder to spy on email. The challenge with keeping email secure is that it requires both the sender and the receiver to support the same encryption technology -- otherwise messages remain unprotected. Though Facebook has supported STARTTLS for several years, of the three biggest webmail providers, only Google's Gmail had adopted it.
Related stories Lavabit founder's DarkMail needs help to cross finish line New Chrome extension hopes to demystify encryption
