The second you send an e-mail from your PC, your personal privacy probably has been compromised.E-mail messages hop from your computer over a number of networks to their final destination, but like a postcard from a vacationer in Mexico, the content can be perused by anyone, at anytime, before it is delivered, experts told UPI's The Web."E-mail is completely open," said Jeff Multz, vice president of sales at SecureWorks Inc.,, a computer security services firm in Atlanta."People think it is secure when it is sent.

The technological envelope, so to speak, for e-mail is encryption -- encoding the message before it is sent and decoding it when it is received.Sophisticated technologies have been around for years to encrypt messages, but for the most part they have been cumbersome to use.Experts said only 2 percent of all e-mail is encrypted today, a mere fraction of the billions of messages routed around the world online.Now, that is starting to change.Software developers are coming out with new technologies that make encrypting messages as easy as sending e-mail itself, and that development may make the Internet safer for surfing -- and less exciting for hackers and computer criminals.

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