In today’s world everybody is dependent on email from business to school to colleges and so on and so forth. It is a tool for communication in everyday life. But have you ever thought that when you email your friend that email can be intercepted by snoopers in between and can be read by anybody who knows how to intercept it and there are many people who know how to read someone else email. There are many occasions wherein you are required to send the sensitive information through email like being a company CEO you want to share with your colleagues the quote price for a tender, but if you want genuinely private communication, you need to encrypt your messages.But e-mail encryption is a real pain. First you need to create one digital ID, in the form of a certificate from a third party. Then you must exchange IDs with every person to whom you might want to send a protected message.
And you'll need to back up your certificate also. If you accidentally lose it may be due to system crash or some other reason then you may not be able to send or receive the protected emails and also you will not be able to read the previous protected email messages. So make sure you take the backup of your certificate.
But with a little guidance from this tutorial, you can send secrets that only the intended recipient can read.
To work with email I use Microsoft's Outlook 2003 and Mozilla's Thunderbird. To use the built-in support for certificates in either program, first go to Thawte or Comodo , which both provide free certificates for secure e-mail.Thawte's process is bit smoother and more thorough. But you can use any one of them.
A thawte Personal E-mail Certificate in conjunction with the thawte Web of Trust allows you to secure and guarantee authorship of your e-mail communications by digitally signing and encrypting your e-mails… absolutely FREE*!
To do so with IE, go to Tools > Internet Options and click the Content tab > click the Certificates button. You can see your new certificate under the Personal tab; select it and click Export. In the resulting Export Wizard, choose to export the private key, keep the defaults for Export File Format, and come up with a password and file name.
For Firefox, go to Tools> Options>Choose Advanced >Encryption. Click the View Certificates button. In the Certificates Manager, select your new e-mail certificate under the Your Certificates tab and click the Backup button.
Save these exported certificate to your USB drive/CD/email, or some other safe place.IE and Outlook share the certificate store, so you don't need to import it to that mail program. For Thunderbird, go through the same steps listed above for Firebox, but click the Import button instead of Backup, and browse to your exported certificate.
You’re now ready to swap certificates with other people so you can send them encrypted e-mail. In Outlook, for composing e-mail, fill in the address of the recipient, and then click the button in the toolbar showing a yellow envelope with a red spot; doing so digitally signs the message and sends your certificate to the recipient. For someone to add your new ID certificate to their version of Outlook, they must open your digitally signed message and then add you as one of their contacts.
In Thunderbird, select Security, Digitally Sign This Message as you type an e-mail. Thunderbird automatically adds newly received certificates from digital signatures.Now, you're ready to send encrypted e-mail which is 100% secure.
Please feel free to share with me your thoughts about the article!!
Post a Comment