Setup and sending encrypted e-mail.

With the changes in many of the laws that kept the government out of your information, they have more access now than anytime in the country’s past. If you don’t mind the intrusion access then that’s fine, but if you do read on.

This entry will cover setting up and sending your encrypted mail to another using Thunderbird, EnigMail plugin and PGP /GnuPG programs. I am using Thunderbird because it is available for most every operating system around and its free, but I would ask you give a donation to help keep it around.

If your already using Thunderbird mail client then you are half way finished, if not you will need to install the client for your OS to use first and get in working correctly. Go to www.mozilla.org/thunderbird/ and download the version for your system, then setup your account. You will need to install enigma mail plugin and GnuPG. To get EnigMail plugin go to http://enigmail.mozdev.org/home/index.php.html and select the version for the OS you are using. If you are using a newer version of Thunderbird you can go to the “Add-ons” sections and search for then install from there, simple and easy or you just download the version and select Install from the “Tools -> Add-ons” menu, Select the .XPI file and install. Go to www.gnupg.org to get a copy of the program and install using the instruction for your OS system.

Now that you have a general idea on what, why and how of encryption, lets get started using it to send mail to another person. Install the Thunderbird plugin and install GNUpg program as well on your system. The first thing you will need to do in set up a public/private key. The Private or (secret key) is for you, the public key is for everyone else. There are two ways to generate the keys. One way is to use the command line, the other is to use the GUI in the Thunderbird OpenPGP option, for now will show the OpenPGP option.

Start Thunderbird then select OpenPGP, from the drop down menu select “Key Management”. Select “Generate” then “New key pair”. Select the Account / User ID you want to use then give it a paraphrase, you may also want to give it a comment, that is up to you. You can leave the Key expires option alone for this time, you can play around with others after setup. Select the Advance tab, depending on the speed of your machine you can leave the settings for Key size and Key type alone. Increasing the size will increase the time it takes to generate the keys, if you want to make it very difficult for people to hack your keys use the 4096 and DSA & EL Gamal option, it will take a while to create the keys so be aware of that. The 2048 key size is quite large and difficult to crack so you can leave the Key size and key type alone. After you are happy with the settings select Generate Key, sit back and wait for a bit while it generates the keys for you. When the keys have been generated they will show up in the Key management box.

Now lets get to using the generated keys. First you need to send them to another person, to do that select Key Management again, you have three options. One option is to send the public key by email, another options is to send the Public Key as a file and the last is to upload the Public Key to a key sever. For now just use Send Public Key by Email option, select the email of the person or persons and send. In the attachment sections you will see the public key, it will be numbers and letter with an .ase extension. When the person gets the email they will save the attachment into there PGP key folder and from then on they can send messages to you encrypted.

Sending encrypted E-mail is quite easy from then on. Select Write then enter the email address, from the OpenPGP menu select Encrypt Message, enter your Subject and message then click Send, you may be asked to verify the recipient public key then it will send the message. When the message is received open the OpenPGP pull down and select Decrypt/Verify, it will ask for the password to your private key and then will decrypt the message. And the good part is it is only decrypted when you want to see it, all the others times is encrypted.

Its sad you have to do this to protect your self from unreasonable intrusion by the government and business but..$fdRuyde^%7gde43%ynb(4sCX234gmq093467v%$dffg4^&=asw