<quote who="Holly Bostick">Nick Smith wrote:is there a way to send encrypted email? so that if the person on the revieving end of the email doesnt have the key they cant view the email?
This question has to go on my "oh, for Pete's sake" list, because if you haven't noticed how many people on this very list sign (a lesser form of encryption/authentication) their mails, it can only be because you don't have any mail encryption software installed yourself. If you did, you wouldn't have to ask this question ;-) .
i did notice that, but if they are encrypted how come i can see them? ive never needed encryption before and asked since i have a need now.
Signed mails are not 'encrypted' per se, but they use a key to authenticate that the user sending the mail is the person it's supposed to be (in the same way that "signing" a letter or contract is binding as your signature authenticates that you are the one communicating).
In any case, what you need is GNUPG (gpg); most, if not all email clients I am familiar with have some facility to encrypt and decrypt mails using it as a backend.
If you use Thunderbird, you'd have to install the Enigmime/Enigmail extension to encrypt/decrypt mail; iIrc, other clients such as Mutt or sylpheed-claws I believe need nothing extra as long as GPG is installed, probably you'd have to make sure you used the proper USE flags when installing Evolution, but Evo may have the facility natively (if it finds GPG is installed).
thats fine but i dont only send emails to linux users, as odd as that sounds, i would assume thier clients have to have the software as well to decrypt the email? actually im the only one on my address that uses linux, (and im not on my address list) so is it cross-platform compaitible? also does it work with webmail aka squirrelmail?
Ummm, yes, is the short answer. Just as HTML does not rely on a particular OS to display in a web browser, so too are encryption keys platform-independent.
Whether or not the receiver has decryption software is their lookout; I would assume that anyone who demanded/requested that you encrypt your emails to them would have a working encryption/decryption setup.
Once you have exchanged public keys with each other, you will be able to read the encrypted mails you send to each other.
sorry im kinda dumb on the topic but never really needed it
until now and was wondering if it was hard to set up. i need
something that will only let the person with the decryption key
read the email,
Yes, that's the whole idea of encrypted emails, so no worries. Once you install and configure GPG (by creating a key for yourself), you will be able to do just that (only people who have a copy of your key will be able to read the mails, and only then after entering their private key into their mail client to decrypt it).
i really dont know what im looking for, that gpg
(thought it was pgp)
GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard, shortened to gpg) replaces pgp.
will work for my box, but what do i do about the people i want to communicate with encrypted? i cant convert them all to linux ;-) believe me ive tried.
You don't have to convert anyone to anything. It wouldn't be much use to have an encryption protocol that only worked on one OS, given that it's a *networking* protocol, not an OS protocol.
Just go to the GPG home page at http://www.gnupg.org/ and read up. It explains stuff pretty well.
Holly -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
