This is a series of tutorials on the subject of encryption and its use in e-mail communications.
Encryption and E-mail
Encryption Basics
We know that the issue of securely sending information without it being read by others has been with us for a long time. Herodotus tells us about incidents in the 5th c. BC when Persia was at war with the Greeks. Two techniques were mentioned. One was writing the message on a writing tablet then …
Creating a Key Pair – Command Line
Now that we have looked at the basics of encryption, it is time to get practical. Just how do you do this? The limited discussion of mathematics and one-way functions may make this seem daunting, but it doesn’t need to be. In fact there are tools that make this extremely simple. If you recall, we …
Creating a Key Pair – GUI Client
Previously we looked at creating your key pair using the Linux command line. But if you are on a different platform, or you prefer to use a GUI client in Linux, you do have alternatives. For this example I will use the KGpg client on Kubuntu 13.04. If you have a Windows client, or a …
Encryption and E-mail with Thunderbird
Now it is time to take a look at practical uses of encryption, and the number one use is for e-mail. Encrypted communication via e-mail is very desirable if you want to keep a secret. In the U.S. the current legal precedents say that any e-mail left on a server is not protected since you …
Encryption and Gmail
Last time we looked at how you can use GPG and Enigmail to digitally sign or encrypt messages in Thunderbird. But today many people use web-based mail, and one of the most popular is Google’s Gmail. Others include Outlook.com and Yahoo, but using any of them is pretty similar. So since I have a Gmail …
Encrypting E-mail on Android; Importing Keys
We have looked at e-mail encryption on both Thunderbird and G-Mail, and that is good, but in 2014 a lot of people use mobile phones and tablets for their e-mail. So it makes sense to look at how we can do this. The solution I am going explore here involves two components, the K-9 Android …
