It's easy to assume that e-mail is secure, but in fact most messages are sent as pure text, with little or no encryption. That means that anybody with the right equipment can read them. This piece of software, based on the highly successful Pretty Good Privacy encryption technique developed in the 'states, attempts to provide greater security to e-mails, whether you're sending confidential reports to a colleague, or rude messages to your secret lover.

PGP Personal Edition contains two software licences, because it's not a great deal of fun sending encrypted messages to yourself. In order to encrypt a document, you use a public key, which is a data file at least 128 bits in length and up to 4,096 bits (the longer it is, the more secure it is). Your public key can be posted onto Network Associates International's Web site, allowing anyone to access it and encrypt a message to you. But the public key cannot be used to decrypt messages. For that, you use your own password-protected private key, to which nobody should have access.

Using the program is simply a matter of clicking a button in your e-mail program (PGP Personal Edition supports Eudora, Outlook and Exchange) or dragging and dropping a file onto the appropriate tool-bar icon (see screenshot) to have it encrypted, signed or decrypted. This doesn't take too long, and will provide the best encryption you are likely to find for public use.

The back of the box states that "On average it would take all the personal computer power in the world to crack your message in 12 million times the age of the universe". Hackers, however, are known for their capacity to exceed the average, so don't assume that your e-mail is totally snooper-proof. PGP Personal Edition will, however, keep out all but the most determined, and they'll have to work very hard indeed to break the code.

If you're the sort of person who just wants to keep the odd prying eye away from your e-mails, then PGP Personal Edition is probably over-kill. But for paranoid company directors and others with information to hide, it could prove very useful.