I plan on spending more time with my PowerBook in cafes and other offices over the summer to beat the heat. One thing always worried me, though. As you know, normal email clients send your email account name and password in "plain text," so if there is some bad guy next to you at the cafe, then he can scoop it up using a sniffer app.
Well, the best solution is to use SSL or POPS or other secure forms of email communication so that your account name and password will be encrypted. The problem is that my ISP (verizon.net) does not have secure email. I've had this email for years, so it's not possible for me to drop it and start over with something like gmail, which does support SSL, so I looked around for another solution. What I came up with is simple and perhaps obvious, but it works great.
Most of the suggestions I found say to use a SSH tunnel or some such, which you still need a server for. Forget that. Way too complicated for me. Here's my little trick, assuming you have at least one SSL-enabled email account somewhere (which is not your main account).
My Verizon account lets me forward all my email to another address. I am a .mac subscriber (which DOES SSL email) so i forward my verizon email (which is an insecure account) to my .mac account (which is secure). I then "de-enabled" my Verizon account in Apple Mail, and now do all my mail off of .Mac using the Apple Mail client. Secure. and yet another reason to keep my .Mac account.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2005061713482622