In today’s electronic world, E-Mail is critical to any business being competitive. In most cases it now forms the backbone of most organizations’ day-to-day activities, and its use will continue to grow. E-Mails have enabled an efficient means of communication, without the limitations of time zones, speed or cost, usually associated with many of the other forms of communication. Though it has lot of advantages, however; E-Mails can easily be used for the negative purposes as well, making SPAM and virus E-Mails a problem especially by the hackers. In this Unit, we’ll understand the key elements that comprise a successful E-Mail Crime & its Investigation and eventually work out on securing the E-Mails.

E-Mail is now considered to be most important in the area of information technology. Hackers come with various sophisticated tools and techniques to invade computers and stealing personal details of users from their E-Mail accounts. There are various traditional security measures available, but in most of the cases it is useless to fight against the latest attacks. So, to protect E-Mails every user/ company should adopt the right security software on computer. The Internet has opened up new doors of opportunities for both private individuals and companies. However, there are different types of viruses, malware and other harmful items that may cause your computer.

Now-a-days, most of the companies implement online transactions and not only the companies but an individual also reap the benefits of the internet. They shop online and also carry out other financial transactions online and somehow keep their personal, financial, and credit card information, Bank Statements etc. in their E-Mail. So, the risk of hacking has also gone up significantly. Due to this reason sufficient assurance for a network, software, and PC are no longer enough. In order to protect the information and data, it has become the need of the hour to adopt new methods, techniques and various tools to implement the optimum level of security.
Electronic mail, which is commonly known as E-Mail is a method of exchanging digital messages across the Internet or other computer networks. E-Mail systems are based on a store-and-forward model in which E-Mail server computer systems accept, forward, deliver and store messages on behalf of users, who only need to connect to the E-Mail infrastructure. Typically an E-Mail server, with a network-enabled device for the duration of message submission or retrieval. Originally, E-Mail was transmitted directly from one user's device to another user's computer, which required both computers to be connected online at the same time.

An electronic mail message consists of two components, the message header, and the message body, which is the E-Mail’s content. The message header contains control information, including, minimally, an originator's E-Mail address and one or more recipient addresses. Usually additional information is added, such as a subject header field. Originally a text-only communications medium, E-Mail was extended to carry multi-media content attachments, which was standardized in RFC 2045 through RFC 2049, collectively called, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME).

The foundation for today's global Internet E-Mail services reaches back to the early ARPANET and standards for encoding of messages were proposed as early as 1973 (RFC 561). An E-Mail sent in the early 1970s looked very similar to one sent on the Internet today. Conversion from the ARPANET to the Internet in the early 1980s produced the core of the current services.

Network-based E-Mail was initially exchanged on the ARPANET in extensions to the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), but is today carried by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), first published as Internet standard 10 (RFC 821) in 1982. In the process of transporting E-Mail messages between systems, SMTP communicates delivery parameters using a message envelope separately from the message (header and body) itself.