If you're being cautious enough to encrypt your e-mail, you should be aware that there's still some information that leaks out to the outside world. Messages in transit from one machine to another are a bunch of textual gobbledygook until decoded. When it's time to reply, you encrypt your message with the recipient's public key and the recipient decodes it with his or her private key. To send a private message, someone encrypts it with your public key you then decrypt it with your private key. Although the public and private keys are mathematically related, you can't derive one from the other.
The person you're corresponding with also has such a pair of keys. You get a private key known only to yourself and a public key that's available for anyone else to use. Here's the quick version of how it works. One form is called, curiously, public key encryption, and this is what GPG and Enigmail use.
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CNET also hosts Thunderbird for Windows and Mac and Enigmail for all platforms.īut first, some background about how it works.Įncryption scrambles messages so that only someone with a key (or a tremendous amount of computing horsepower, or knowledge of how to exploit an encryption weakness) can decode them.
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Specifically, I'll show here how to use a collection of free or open-source software packages: GPG, or GNU Privacy Guard, Mozilla Messaging's Thunderbird e-mail software, and its Enigmail plug-in. I'm not going so far as to recommend you use e-mail encryption, but I think this is a good time to take a close look at it. But some human rights activists who used Gmail right now likely wish they'd put up with a little hardship to help keep hackers at bay. Unfortunately, better security typically goes hand in hand with increased inconvenience. It's called public key encryption, and I'm sharing some instructions on how to get it working if you want try it. Well, if you want to take a significant step in keeping prying eyes away from your electronic correspondence, one good encryption technology that predates Google altogether is worth looking at. Perhaps Google's announcement that Chinese cyber attackers went after human rights activists' Gmail accounts has made you skittish about just how private your own messages are on the Google e-mail service.
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