Electronic mail must be God's gift to business. It reduces timewasting, speeds up decision-making and improves communications. The longer a company has been using e-mail, the better it will perform on the market. In personal as well as in business terms, e-mail has changed the way in which people communicate with each other and has brought unlikely groups together. So far so good. Then what has e-mail not done? It hasn't made communications secure, not even at the hub of the industry. Hacking e-mail, particularly web-based systems like Hotmail, whose contents are in cyberspace for a long period ot time, is, it would appear, child's play. Governments, on the other hand, do not want to have sophisticated encryption techniques used, as these would be so secure that they would place e-mail out of reach of surveillance. What, then, is the sender's best protection? It would appear that the sheer volume of e-mail messages hurtling through cyberspace is, like the herd of zebras which mass together to discourage attacks by lions, our best protection against cyberspace predators. It must be for this reason that people persist in writing about sensitive or confidential matters in their e-mail. However, given the undoubted talent and ingenuity of hackers, isn't a more secure e-mail system possible?