I’ve written two posts about encrypting email. The problem is that encrypting email has always been a pain in the butt. Who wants to go through the trouble? Yeah, pretty much no one.

Well, I found a very easy solution to the problem. It’s a program called Cipher Mail that was reviewed on Wired News [article here] a couple of years ago that I somehow managed to find only yesterday.

The password annoyance mentioned in that article has long since been addressed.

In short, it’s an install-and-forget approach to encrypting your email. You never have to mess with keys, keyservers, encrypting, decrypting… you don’t have to worry about whether or not the other person supports it, or any of the issues commonly associated with this type of security. Cipher Mail handles everything.

The only significant downside that immediately comes to mind is that it effectively removes the convenience of a web based email account. Logging into your GMail (or Yahoo or Hotmail) account to read your mail would be fruitless because the messages would be in their encrypted form. Only once your email program retrieved the messages to your computer would Cipher Mail be able to decrypt it.

This is a big problem as one would not be able to read their mail from work or other locations.

You also, of course, still need to convince your friends to install the program onto their computers. Without your friends using it you would still be able to communicate just as easily as ever, but your messages would remain unencrypted.

Despite these two issues, if you’re a security conscious person then this is an easy solution to email privacy concerns. I’m running it in addition to supporting OpenPGP.

~Steph