• Software
• Securing your communication
• Newsletters, Mailinglists and more.

For almost all journalists email has become a vital tool for communication. It's the cheapest and fastest form of communciation. You can send articles, pictures or even videos from your computer to any newsroom or editor in the world.

Software

All you need is internet-access. For a a lot of people using a free, web-based services like Hotmail is all they need. But if you use email regularly - as you should - then you will soon have to find a ways to manage all your mails. Fortunately there are a lot of advanced email programs on the market. The three that we would like to recommend are: Pegasus Mail, Eudora and the shareware program The Bat. In our experience these programmes offer the most flexibility and the most powerful tools to sort and manage your emails.

We do not recommend using Microsofts Outlook or Outlook-Express since its weaknesses are being used too often to distribute viruses for worms.

Securing your communication

One of the largest disadvantages of emails is that they are very easy to intercept and read. Obviously this is a problem if your are an investigative journalist and have to protect your communication. In these cases you should encrypt your mail. If you want to know more about encryption - it's not difficult - you should our page about PGP (Pretty Good Privacy).

Unfortunately this will still not prevent a server-administrator from finding out that your source has sent you something. He will not be able to read the content of the mail, but he will still know that there was some for of mail-excahnge between the two of you. Therefor you should alwasy tell your sources not to send you mails from their workplace. It's just to dangerous.

Newsletters, Mailinglists and more

Since E-Mail is (almost) free, very fast and able to deliver information to the receipients workplace or home, it is also an ideal medium to deliver or exchange information very efficiently. To find out, how to use email as a reasearch-too, please visit our page on mailinglist.

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