Maintaining both security and privacy is a challenge when only a third of your trusted partners have firewalls or anti-spam/anti-virus protection. Hackers can harvest your address lists… and worse… by cracking them.

If you’re a big enough account, you can push smaller ops to up their game. But what if they’re so small that they depend on a third party service for email?

In our recent survey of email services, we could not find a single service that guarantees the privacy of the correspondent. If you’re emailing to a company that uses an outside service… you may as well be megaphoning your thoughts from a rooftop.

Company interests and secrets, hopes and dreams are inextricably connected with your name and email address. No privacy. No protection. No rights. Zero. Zip. Nada.

You can’t swat every ISP and provider swarming the planet. So what can you do to protect your company’s privacy and security?

Encourage partners who use third party email services to insist that the providers include correspondent privacy protections in their policy statements. And illuminate your end-users.

Or just give up, like Sun’s CEO:“You have zero privacy anyway…”

Of course, he means you, not him. We hear his protectors do a pretty good job.