Enigmail -- Email Encryption for Thunderbird
Posted on Thursday, June 15, 2006 at 5:01 PM by Randall
It seems like everyone wants to be able to read your email these days: the company you work for, the government, etc. If you value your privacy, you can make it much harder for people to read your email by encrypting it. GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) is a powerful freeware encryption program, but it is a command line program and very hard to use. The Enigmail extension for Thunderbird makes it easy to use GnuPG to encrypt, decrypt and sign emails.
Here are some of the main features of Enigmail from the extension's web site:
* Encrypt/sign mail when sending, decrypt/authenticate received mail
* Support for inline-PGP (RFC 2440) and PGP/MIME (RFC 3156)
* Per-Account based encryption and signing defaults
* Per-Recipient rules for automated key selection, and enabling/disabling encryption and signing
* OpenPGP key management interface
* Automatically encrypt attachments for inline PGP messages
* Powerful GUI for easy configuration and management
* User Preferences for advanced configuration
* Integrated OpenPGP PhotoID Viewer
* Supports OpenPGP key retrieval via proxy servers
* Integrates with GnuPG
The Enigmail web site even explains in detail how to set up and configure GnuPG -- the hardest part of the process. Once Enigmail is installed on your system, you'll need to get your friends and associates to use it (or an equivalent program for their mail client). Then you will be able to email each other without fear of others being able to read your email. Government spy agencies may have the computing power to break the GnuPG code and read a message, but chances are good that your neighborhood hacker trying to listen in our your cable connection or your boss does not.
Rating: 4.0
Operating System: Windows (and others)
License:
Freeware
Price: Free
Version: 0.94.0
Web Site:
http://enigmail.mozdev.org/index.html
See
Screenshots