Securing Your Email With Thunderbird and GPG: a Crashcourse
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By Antonius_Block at 2006-05-07 15:03
Introduction
Here is a quick and easy way to secure your email via public-key encryption using Thunderbird and GPG in an OS-agnostic environment.
Requirements
Thunderbird >= 1.5
GPG
1. Download and Install the Enigmail Thunderbird Extension:
Goto the new OpenPGP menu and select Key Managment
In the new window, select Generate->New Key Pair
Select which account you would like to associate the Keys with.
Enter a password for the keys and select Generate Keys.
Your newly generated keys should now be in the key management list of managed keys.
3. Test the Encryption
Create a new Email to yourself
Enter some text in the subject and body
From the OpenGPG menu, select Sign Message and Encrypt Message
When you select the Send button, you will see your message converted to ASCII Armor, which is your message encrypted using your key information.
Select Get Mail to receive your new encrypted message. By default the encrypted message will be decrypted automatically. You can change this from the OpenPGP menu.
4. Distribute your public key. It will be used by others to encrypt email sent to you.
There are quite a few mentions of "OpenPGP" in this article, which I think should read "OpenGPG" instead
Cheers,
-jk
by Bharatsoni on Tue, 2007-02-20 06:03
Although this is a good article, I need to know what will be the next step to decrypt the message that is being send.
Say I follow the procedure as told with thundrbird. I send a mail (encrypted & signed) to a person who is using outlook on xp machine. How that mail will be decrypted. I have also send my public key to him. What that person need to use with outlook to decrypt the message.
Thanks in anticipation.
by x81kilo on Fri, 2010-09-17 16:41
was Bharatsoni's question ever answered on how to read on the receiving end an encrypted msg?
by chursch on Wed, 2013-02-13 16:47
I'd certainly like to know as I have a use for secure email. I've heard of hushmail, but this route might be better. What would the person who receives my encrypted email have to do to decrypt and read my email?
by Habitual on Wed, 2013-02-20 17:36
Quote:
Originally Posted by chursch
I'd certainly like to know as I have a use for secure email. I've heard of hushmail, but this route might be better. What would the person who receives my encrypted email have to do to decrypt and read my email?
they'd use the key you used to encrypt, except they'd decrypt.
Public key for encryption.
Private key for decryption.
I've used Tbird+hushmail+enigmail in the past and it's not that difficult.
You can download EnigMail for many versions of Thunderbird here...
by chursch on Fri, 2013-02-22 17:49
Thanks for the pointer. I took a brief look for it, and now have the pointer to this should I wish to pursue it. It looks promising. I wonder how easy it would be to educate my stockbroker (or whoever) on setting this up, who says he's a total zero on tech stuff - probably depends on his company's policy on trying to do something like this with their email systems. But I'd certainly prefer to send him confidential emails this way rather than using dumb paper-wasting faxes.
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Cheers,
-jk
Say I follow the procedure as told with thundrbird. I send a mail (encrypted & signed) to a person who is using outlook on xp machine. How that mail will be decrypted. I have also send my public key to him. What that person need to use with outlook to decrypt the message.
Thanks in anticipation.
Public key for encryption.
Private key for decryption.
I've used Tbird+hushmail+enigmail in the past and it's not that difficult.
You can download EnigMail for many versions of Thunderbird here...
Getting started with encrypted e-mail using Thunderbird and Enigmail
https://www.youtube.com/results?q=th...d+and+enigmail