Why are there two links for every email reader?

There are two links for each of the web-based mail reading programs to allow you to choose to open a mail session through an encrypted tunnel (secure) or in plain text. In the plain text, all the text displayed on your browser travels over the Internet without any encryption. This would possibly allow someone to watch the email you are reading. Reading your mail in this fashion is not recommended.

The link labeled "secure" opens an encrypted tunnnel between your web browser and our mail server. This means that all data sent from our server to you and all data sent from you to our mail server are scrambled so that even if someone is able to intercept the session between your browser and us, they will not be able to easily see what the data says.

If secure is so much better, you might be wondering why we offer the un-secured method at all. We offer it so that users who are behind a firewall that blocks secure tunnels may read their mail. Also there are some browsers that do not support encrypted email (some "palm" style devices or custom browsers like WebTV etc) and we want to provide the most flexibility for our users.

In short, we suggest you always use the link labeled SECURE to access your email as this insures the highest level of privacy.