You can always save your passphrase in the OS X keychain if you are confident your machine is secure and nobody could send messages on your behalf. They main thing to look for here is the line just above the message that says: Your message will look very much like it did when you created it. This shows that the email was encrypted when sent to you. This is a good question, and something you should check to satisfy yourself that it really was. Because the encryption is so well integrated with your email client, you never usually get to see the encrypted message. To see the message as it was sent to the email servers, and also how it is stored on your machine:Ī window will open to show you the message as it is stored on your computer. We have excluded the message headers in the screen-shot above just to make the image smaller. It is worth having a close look at this window to familiarise yourself with what is encrypted and what isn’t. You will notice that sender, recipient and the subject line are not encrypted. This is necessary or it would not be possible to deliver your message (certainly in the case of recipient anyway). Do not put anything confidential in the subject of your emails. However, the entire body of your message was encrypted and you will not see the text “This is my first encrypted message using Apple Mail, GPGMail and OpenPGP.” anywhere. Note: Any attachments to your email (such as photographs or documents) will also be encoded with no further action on your part. Once they are decoded at the recipient end they will appear just as in an unencrypted message. Sending your first signed messageĬompose another message addressed to yourself similar to the one below. This time, click the seal icon above and to the right of the body of your message so that is shows as selected (as below). This will tell Mail to sign the outgoing message. You can always send signed messages whether you have the public key of your recipients or not. You can now click Send and your message will be sent to you. If you don’t want the signed option to be enabled for each new message by default, there is a way to turn this off by entering a command in the Terminal application. To launch the Terminal application go to Applications > Utilities and click on Terminal. defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/ SignNewEmailsByDefault -bool NO Reading your first signed message You can copy and paste the following command directly in to Terminal. Here you will notice that under the messages headers and just above the content you see the line: When you receive your signed email, open it and you should see a window similar to the one below. This tells you that the message was signed with the key for the email address mentioned. If you click on the seal icon, a window like the one below appears to give you more information about the key used to sign the message. If you receive signed emails from people whose public key you do not have, this may read “unknown key”. Keys have an ID number and Mail may try to download the relevant key from the key servers so that it can identify the sender. The next step is generate a public-private key pair, and publish your public key (so others can find your public key to send you encrypted email).If it can find the key it will be added to your key chain.Īs with the encrypted message, it is worth looking at the source code of the email so that you are aware of what signed emails look like in their “raw” format.Īt first glance the source code looks similar to the encrypted message code. After confirming that Thunderbird can send/receive email, Enigmail plug-in can be installed and configured to use the GPG on your platform. You don't need a new email account - this setup works with your existing email account. After that, the next step is to install Thunderbird, a mail client. There are instructions for Linux, Mac, and Windows below. The first step is to install GPG for your platform. Thunderbird is an email client, and Enigmail is the plug-in that uses GPG for that platform to integrate that into a user's email account. GPG is a tool that does several things, but mostly it is used to generate a public/private key pair and maintains a user's keychain - the set of public keys from all their contacts. For an overview of how public key encryption works, this is an excellent explanation: Public Key Cryptography: Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange.
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