Sending email securely used to be hard. So hard, that only large corporations and paranoid techies would even bother. It also used to be expensive. The iPhone has helped to change all that.

People loved their iPhones from when they were first released back in 2007. Although (some) IT departments preferred the ‘control’ afforded to them with Blackberry’s Enterprise Server or manilla interdepartmental envelopes – when the CEOs and the head of Sales demanded corporate email on their iPhones even Mordac (the Preventer of Information Services) had to respond.

Apple licensed software from Microsoft in 2008 to make it easy to connect to Exchange powered email systems which was great for businesses, but in 2011 with the release of iOS 5.0 Apple added secure email support for regular folks, through the use of Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME).

Read on to learn how to communicate securely on your iPhone with your kith and kin.

Seth Godin, the author of numerous best-selling books, is a self-described writer, speaker and “agent of change“. He recently submitted his latest manifesto (Stop Stealing Dreams) for sale from Apple’s iBookstore and was genuinely surprised when it was rejected.

He argues in a post on PaidContent.org that bookstores, and especially the three large U.S. online stores (Amazon, Apple and Barnes and Noble) are expected to provide “Universal availability” of any title that you order. He further explains that Apple rejected his eBook because it contained links, or URLs, in the bibliography that linked to another online bookstore (Amazon).

Leaving aside whether merchants should have to sell products they don’t want to, or if Apple’s preference was not to include any links at all, Seth would have preferred that the choice to include any links was left up to him.

Luckily, there is an easy solution to this problem.

At the Frankfurt Book Fair the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) announced the final version of of a major revision to EPUB, the global standard interchange and delivery format for eBooks and other digital publications. The IDPF membership elevated EPUB 3.0 to a final IDPF Recommended Specification.

Registered Apple Developers (registration is free) can now view (and download slides) from the iBook presentation (Session 507) recently given at the developers conference.

In May 2011 the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) released the latest verison of the EPUB specification, EPUB3. As befits the latest moniker there are three key areas addressed in this version: language support, accessibility and improved multimedia support.