GeroW4lll

So I started fiddling about with email encryption again today, for the first time in years.

OK so it's not really foolproof (see comic). Because I generally refrain from felonious behaviour and terrorism, I probably don't need it. Who is really interested in spying on my private emails anyway? Right?

But I just get this paranoid feeling when I'm about to hit send on that PG13 rated love letter (hehe). I hear that email is just about as secure as sending a postcard. All the people at the post office can read your postcards, including that weird guy in the sorting room. He might also be sniffing or licking it. Ewwww. In the same way, anyone with access to any of the mail servers your message travels through can read it. Not to mention that anyone sniffing your packets (heheh I used sniff and packet in the same sentence) can invade your privacy too.

Since I use Mozilla's Thunderbird already, these instructions from Life Hacker came in quite handy. I upgraded the instructions by using this file http://ftp.gpg4win.org/gpg4win-light-2.0.4.exe which is a newer version of GnuPG for Windows, and selecting GPG2.exe when asked where the executable was.

The Enigmail addon for Thunderbird makes this absolutely the easiest way to encrypt email in Windows. It seems in Linux it's commonplace.

I tried to set it up on my work notebook on Outlook, but it doens't work on Microsoft Exchange server yet. Microsoft apparently didn't document the addon interface for Outlook so well, so the GPG developers are having a tough time. For my family I could set it up on Outlook with difficulty on a pop mail address, but errors including decrypted mail occasionally left on the server is some of the known problems.

Finally on Outlook Express it will never work as there doesn't even seem to be an add-on interface. I did install GPG on the pc and I was able to encrypt and sign a message, and to decrypt the reply by copying the encrypted gibberish block and pasting it to the GPG clipboard crypto app. It's nifty enough but cutting and pasting is really clumsy compared to the Thunderbird solution. I better just move all my family over to Thunderbird.