PGP - impressed this feature is added. Just created keys but don’t know which is my public key and which is my private key. Can someone tell me what key to provide to the recipient of an encrypted email?
You use the recipient’s key to send them an encrypted email.
If you want to send someone your public key, go to Menu > Tools > Settings > Signing and Encryption > Certificates and keys.
Click on the Details gear icon next to your key. At the bottom, click on send. This will open a new email with your public key attached, so they can send you encrypted emails.
You can also set defaults to include the the key on all outgoing messages in Menu > Tools > Settings > Signing and Encryption > Account policies.
Either way, once you have sent an email with your public key, you can always save the attachment from the sent message for later use if that is easier.
Thanks for your reply. I assume that the recipient MUST use eMail to decrypt the message since the key is not separate from the email and the public key cannot be distributed separately from an email so that anyone could encrypt an email, not just recipients. Am I correct?
Thanks again.
Generally, you require an email client to read email. That might be installed on your computer, or it may be through a web browser. That is true of normal or encrypted emails. There is a way to decrypt emails outside of your client, but that is complicated. Luckily mail clients, like eM Client, have made it easy to do on the fly.
The public key is separate from the email. It would not make much sense to send the password along with the encrypted email. The process to send Bob an encrypted email is to ask him to first send you his public key. Once you have that and installed it in your email client, you can send him an encrypted email. His key is not attached to that email. That means that if someone intercepts the email en-route, they cannot read it. If the key was attached, then they could.
If you want people to send you encrypted email, you first need to send them your public key. You can do that as I described above, or you can also export the public key and distribute how you wish. Once they have your public key, they can send you encrypted emails or files.
Hi Kim,
One way of sending encrypted e-mails is that you encrypt your e-mail with a key, and send the encrypted e-mail (and somehow also the same key used to encrypt the e-mail) to a person who will then be able to decrypt your e-mail.
Of course this is not a safe way, and PGP works in a totally different way, with so-called private-public key pairs. The sender of an e-mail creates a private-public key pair, and the receiver of an e-mail creates a private-public key pair.
So there are 4 keys playing a role when sending encrypted e-mails. 2 of them are only used to encrypt the text of the e-mail, and 2 are used to make sure to the receiver of the e-mail that the e-mail is really sent by the person who claims to have sent that e-mail.
Suppose there are 2 persons: Kim and Bob. Kim wants to send an e-mail to Bob which only Bob can read. Kim also wants to make sure that Bob can be certain that it was really Kim who has sent the e-mail.
Both Kim and Bob create their key-pairs, let’s call them (Kim-private, Kim-public) and (Bob-private, Bob-public).
Kim must send her public key (in some way) to Bob. This can be done by attaching her public key to an un-encrypted e-mail.
Bob must send his public key (in some way) to Kim. This can be done by attaching his public key to an un-encrypted e-mail.
If Kim wants to send the text ‘abc’ to Bob, then the following steps can take place.
Kim encrypts ‘abc’ using her private key, Kim-private. This generates the text ‘def’. This step will later make sure that it was really Kim who has sent this e-mail.
Then Kim encrypts the (already encrypted) text ‘def’ again, now using Bob’s public key, Bob-public. This creates the text ‘ghi’. This step makes sure that only Bob will be able to decrypt and read the original text of the e-mail.
Kim sends the encrypted e-mail ‘ghi’ to Bob.
Bob receives the encrypted text ‘ghi’.
Bob decrypts the e-mail using his private key, Bob-private. This will generate the text ‘def’.
Bob decrypts the text ‘def’ using the public key of Kim. This will generate the original text ‘abc’.
If during transportation of the e-mail the e-mail was changed by a bad person, or a bad person tries to send Bob an e-mail claiming to be from Kim, the text ‘def’ can not be successfully decrypted to the text ‘abc’.
Now Bob can read the e-mail and can be sure that it was really Kim who has sent the e-mail.
In a ‘formula’:
resulting message = Kim-public (Bob-private (Bob-public (Kim-private (original message))))
Only if the text of the encrypted e-mail has not been tampered with during transportation, the ‘resulting message’ will be the same as the ‘original message’.
This is the why and I am looking for the how which the video outlines in a basic way using eM Mail 7. I don’t see an encrypt button on the toolbar as shown in the video. That’s why I asked about how to send an encrypted message.Thanks BTW.
eM Client makes it really easy for you to send and receive encrypted and signed emails. When composing a new email, you can select the options on the toolbar.
Or you can set eM Client up to do it automatically in settings.
