are emails secure?

I recently spoke to a CEO who really believed that his email was totally secure since they had their own "extremely secure" data center. Total nonsense! When the email leaves that very secure server in the data center it will go through a minimum of 2 service providers and very often numerous routers and switches on its way to the recipient. These "boxes" that the email passes through can be accesses by a large amount of people (typically support people) and of course these people can read these emails if they wanted to (just make a copy). Actually many ISP's do keep copies of all the emails that pass through their server!

Emails are NOT secure (encrypted emails are more secure BUT that requires decryption on the other end, a daunting task).

The root of the problem here is really the lack of understanding IT in its basic form at the CEO level, a subject for a separate post. Lack of knowledge is costly.