I am a bit confused about the subject of encription. The highest encryption you can get at this moment is 128kb, i think. But only certain protocols use it. Most emails are sent without encription. Is that for speed or efficiency?
Does anyone know how I could make tcp-ip and my web mail protocols use 128kb encryption?
I am guessing that this question is probably silly for a programmer, but I am an engineer and I'd like to know what protocals it is possible to attach this encription to.

y not just encrypt the data then send it thru the email?

and you can get higher, I'm guessing you mean 128 bit is the highest legal in the UK?, in the US i think they now allow 256, but you can easily get higher off the Internet

Just for the record, it's just 128 / 256 bit encryption, not kbit.

I did'nt know that you can get 256 encryption now. Are their any programs that allow me to do this, that come with a Mandrake 9.1 distro?

For encrypting a data stream (like a tcp connection) where you have a significant amount of data to encrypt and speed is important, you really don't want much higher than 256-bit. Beyond that and your connection will start to crawl (in fact you'll notice a slight difference using 128 vs 64-bit WEP keys with 802.11). That being said, there are a number of encryption protocols that you can use (ipsec, ssl, CIPE. etc)

If you just want to encrypt something like a file or a email message, you can get away with using much, much larger keys (most of the major protocols top out at 4096-bit (512-byte) keys), though the current standard for gpg is 1024-bit keys. In this case, since you are only doing a one-time encryption (compared to encrypting a data stream) you can afford to pay the added time penalty in order to use larger keys.

I learnt that the highest encryption I could get anywhere was 128kilobit. The incription that the US Gov tried to sue because it would take them a hundred years to uncode. I am really confused now learning that there are much higher encryption than 256bit. I know that bytes instead of bits are used when reffering to kilo, meaning 1000* bytes. Could someone tell me what incription is the highest available.