E-Mail Encryption

[Lazarus52980]

Yesterday during a meeting with the county social workers, I was told that to send them e-mails with information on the kids we are watching (doing foster care), the e-mails need to be encrypted. I am not familiar with e-mail encryption and a quick search on the net gives a few programs that are supposed to do it, but little information on it...

Anyone have any advice on settings this up on my home computer please?

 

[lxskllr]

I don't encrypt my mail, but here's a Google search on doing it with Thunderbird. You should be able to find something that suits your needs.

https://www.google.com/search?num=2...cryption+thunderbird&spell=1&biw=1280&bih=845

Edit:
Doing a little reading, I like the look of Enigmail for Thunderbird. It's crossplatform, free, and easy to implement...

http://enigmail.mozdev.org/home/index.php.html

 

[VinylxScratches]

Email over the internet is usually in clear text. Are you emailing using a VPN and mailserver internally?

 

[Lazarus52980]

Email over the internet is usually in clear text. Are you emailing using a VPN and mailserver internally?

No, not at all, just e-mailing with my Hotmail account.

 

[Firetower]

You should probably go back to your social workers and ask them what they use to encrypt/decrypt emails. If you go one way they may not beable to decrypt.

When you send the social worker the email you are using their public key to encrypt the email so she can decrypt it with her private key.

 

[Zugzwang152]

Legit request, but hard on you to implement unless they provide you access to their corporate solution. A lot of them will have "secure reply" functionality do you can probably ask them to send you an empty encrypted message, and use the secure reply to respond to them with confidential info. Most of them boil down to an https webmail-type interface.