Encrypt your Gmail, Live and Yahoo emails
With the current NSA affair and its PRISM program apparently listening to our conversations and reading our emails, some people may be looking to shield themselves a bit more from intrusive eavesdropping on their communications.
Email as we know it, is obviously not entirely secure. Evasive tricks such as the ones used by General Petraeus to conceal his affair with Paula Broadwell didn’t work very well. [they created a fake email acount and communicated by saving drafts to that account, only communicating via drafts, so the emails couldn’t be traced as outgoing emails].
Wait, you say you use https or ssl? that’s great… however, that protects your message from being read while going over the wire to your email provider. Once it arrived at the email server in its encrypted form, it can, and usually is, decrypted and stored in its original format.
The best possible way to keep your comms secure and private is to encrypt your message with unbreakable technology and store it as such on the server. The recipient will be the only one able to read the content and will do so, once it is rendered in the browser. In other words, the message content is encrypted throughout its journey, end-to-end, and any copies left on any servers it passed through, are simply unreadable by anyone.
Technology like this is nothing new; in fact, PGP, one of the most prevalent one has been around since 1991.
Now, there are plenty tools to do this encryption for you, but what if you had this option to encrypt your messages, right in your Gmail client, but separate enough so that no private content is ever stored on the Gmail servers..? Yes…? yes.
It’s called Mailvelope and it is a nifty chrome extension that will just “plug in” to your favourite mail client. [btw, it will work for most popular online email clients too, ie yahoo, live, etc.]
When composing a new message, you will get an option to encrypt icon:
When you click on this icon, you get a dialog/form that will encrypt any text or html into something unreadable like below.
On the other end, when an encrypted text block is recognized, the plugin prompts you to unlock the message with your local private key.
