public key email encryption

Question

Who has their email fully encrypted ?

I would like to encrypt my email but I am not sure how to start. If I use encrypted email and I send an email to someone who does not encrypt his email how can the receiver read the email ?

What email client would you recommend to run on a windows systems for encrypted email ? I am using Thunderbird at the moment.

As I understand you have to generate 2 keys (one public and one private) but how do you generate this key? I also think that you have to put your key somewhere to download but I don't understand how you can trust the downloaded keys.

Any links to a good (not too complicated) guide about the working an implementing of email encryption would be very much appreciated.

kind regards wim hendrix anatak

Answer 1

Thunderbird with Enigmail is a great free solution for what you’d like to do. I use Outlook and PGP, but I think they’re approximately the same.

For a detailed explanation of public/private key encryption check out the wiki page, but I’ll try to sum up here.

To encrypt a message so that nobody else but the receiver (bob) can view it you encrypt the message using Bob’s public key. The public key allows you to encrypt but not to decrypt. Without a public key you cannot encrypt a message, so there is no worry about encrypting a message that nobody can decrypt.

When Bob receives your message he will use his private key to decrypt the message. He keeps this private key very secret so that nobody else can decrypt his mail. To send an encrypted message back Bob will use _your public key (which you have sent him before) to encrypt a message. Then he will send it to you and you can decrypt it using your private key.

That said the solution that I use for my mail is to use opportunistic encryption, so if I have the public key of any recipient of my mail message it gets automatically encrypted, if I do not, it doesn’t. This doesn’t protect me from accidentally sending out a secret message to a person that I don’t have a public key for however. For that I have to be very careful to always verify I have all the keys I need to have for secret messages.

In order to do this I have an e-mail rule setup that says that if I have the word [PGP] in the subject line it will not allow the message to be sent unencrypted. If I try to it will throw an error and warn me of my mistake.

The enigmail site has a good description on how to setup thunderbird to encrypt your messages.

Answer 2

I actually use FireGPG, it's a Firefox Extension that enables you to encrypt, sign, decrypt, verify, and more operations directly on Firefox, I mainly use it in GMail...

I also use GPG4Win, it's a package for Windows that bundles:

• GnuPG, the actual cryptographic software
• Two key managers (WinPT, GPA)
• GPGee (for Explorer shell integration)
• GPGol (a plugin for MS Outlook)
• Claws Mail (actually a complete mail program).

This package it's very good for get GnuPG up and running quickly...

Answer 3

I use Outlook and PGP and have done for over 10 years without problems. The PGP outlook plugin just works. No complications to the setup. Only hitch recently is needing to upgrade PGP when I upgraded to Office 2007. (PGP 8.1 is deleting the entire email contents and doing weird things with attachments.)

There are several public key servers where you can upload your public key and find other peoples.

PGP is compatible with GPG so I can exchange encrypted emails with colleagues who use GPG and Thunderbird.