Email has changed our culture of communication. It has not only helped us to remain in touch with our business and personal contacts, but has rather helped us to communicate with more people frequently. There are several reasons to its popularity as a medium of communication. Some could be very specific to each one of us. The general ones could be that it is free, allows us to communicate at will, the recipient can check the mail as per convenience and beyond doubt is instant.

In the changed global scenario, where threat perception has overall increased, anything can be misused. Email is no exception. We have seen several cases where emails have been used to threaten people, politicians, celebrities and even nations. In India there have been several incidences where emails were used by terrorists to threaten people.

We have to make the emails very secure. At present we cannot afford to stop this channel of communication. In my opinion there is a need of third party security system for emails. Some security vendor like VeriSign can be very instrumental in making our emails secure. The email service providers, particularly the free services like Gmail, Yahoomail, Hotmail, etc. should tie up with the vendors like VeriSign to essentially have a security feature while registering for an email id. Every person intending to have an email id must register with a vendor like VeriSign to have evisa (a code generated by the third party security vendor for each individual who registers). For having an evisa the person must be required to send a copy of valid id document to the evisa issuer. So against the code there will be some genuine document authenticating the identification of the person.

After securing the evisa code, the person can register for an email id by giving this code in the details of registration. This code has to be an essential feature without which nobody could register an id. Same procedure could be used for doing any transaction over Internet. It could be used for registering over any social networking site, buying air-tickets, buying things over Amazon or eBay, etc.

By this procedure, every holder of an identity over Internet would have a mirror identity based on genuine valid documents. To facilitate this partnering between the security vendor and the service providers regulators like FCC must initiate the process by forming an alliance with this objective. However, this system will still be questionable as which documents would be accepted and how to ascertain their validity. Another issue is that the process might make the process of getting an identity over Internet time consuming. These issues could be worked out and we can have the solutions. Right now the most important thing is that we have some tool in place.

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