Across the last couple of months I have seen more and more marketers asking for the possibility to send out their communications through a secured end-to-end encrypted connection.
A while ago, Gmail started to promote TLS (Transport Layer Security) encryption for marketers sending communications towards individuals using their services. While, the fact of not sending your communications through TLS would not mean that your communications will not be delivered to your recipients, it will however have an impact on your image as a business as Google would be displaying an open red padlock to notify the related recipients that you are not sending communications through a secured connection.
The attempt was obviously to try and push you to implement (at the ESP level) TLS encryption for your email stream and therefore ensure that all communications are being encrypted from end-to-end therefore helping to fight spam or other phishing attempts.
Sending your communications through a TLS connection is actually a good idea if you are including sensitive information within your communications such as:
- Bank details
- Personal health information
- Other sensitive data …
However, for plain marketing communications which are only referring to your firstname (Hello Bob,) this would not be as useful as it sounds to be.
In fact there is a down side to the above as sending emails through a TLS connection is lengthier than a plain SMTP connection, you are likely to experience performance issues or a slower delivery.