Secure E-mail Question

[kevinj]

I have never worked with or looked into secure e-mail but now have a client who wants a contact form on their site that sends an e-mail them when someone fills out the form. They want that e-mail and their e-mail response to the form submitter to be secure. What are the issues here and what's the most popular way of accomplishing this? Are there server implications?

Thanks in advance.
Kevin

[karmov]

E-mail was never designed to be secure. Therefore trying to securing is like bailing water out of a sinking boat. You can try, I know lots of people that use things like PGP to help maintain the integrity of their e-mails, but in the end these are just bandaids to a protocol that was never meant to do what people are asking it to do these days. Since you can secure your end servers and HTTP connections, maybe feed the user a URL to a secure web site that requires some verification?

[kevinj]

Thanks karmov. I've recommended to them that we handle it through the web site with https and not go the e-mail route.

Kevin