Everyone should encrypt their emails … especially geeks, who can be expected to understand how little effort it would take for a rogue sysadmin or clever hacker to sniff your email on it’s way to it’s intended destination.
Incidentally, if you’re a geek and you don’t know that, you should try running WireShark while you download and send emails…
Anyway. The point of this email is to point out that Comodo (one of the biggest SSL Certificate vendors, and one who’s trust certificates are pre-installed on Windows) is giving away free secure email certificates which you can use in Outlook, Thunderbird, or whatever your favorite email client is. They’re actually on the recommendation list from Microsoft, but inexplicably listed under “other” office versions (they work fine in Outlook 2007, just to be clear).
All you need to do now is run off and sign up and then tell all your friends and family to do the same thing.
I whole heartedly agree!
Watching Wireshark for even 5 minutes shows just how much plaintext communication happens for all of us that should probably be at least a LITTLE more difficult to read
Thank you for one of the most useful tidbits I’ve learned this year. I will be passing the tip on….
I got mine. The big challenge is getting the public key shared so that others can send secure mail to me. A digital signature is a good start but encryption is the key here and both sender and receiver have to play together.
You can share keys most of the time by just sending the email signed. The receiving party can just drag your email onto their contact books to create or update a contact and save the cert.
You can use a tool called U-Btech ESIEmail Protector, This tool automatically share your keys with any user that install this tool.
If you do not have a certificate this tool will enroll you the Sign and Encrypt certificates.
You can use ESIEmail with the following procedure:
1) Download the product from the following location: http://www.u-btech.com/mailprotector/downloads/...
Your default web browser should open and you should see a message saying your activation was successful.
2) Extract the files and double-click the Setup.exe file.
3) Follow the on screen instructions and close Microsoft Outlook if required.
4) Start Outlook, the “Activate my ESIEMail Account” should appear.
5) Type in your information including your desired password for your “ESIEMail Protector” account and click on “Activate”.
6) You should be getting an email address from the following address: Registration@U-BTech.com (Make sure you check you Junk-Email folder for the email).
7) Click on the activation link in the email to verify you are the rightful owner of the registered email address.
9) Close your web browser and close Microsoft Outlook.
10) When starting Microsoft Outlook again you should see U-BTech’s ESIEMail Protector toolbar on the main Outlook window and in each new email message you create.