Tutorial: How to encrypt E-Mail with PGP
Posted: March 21st, 2014 | Author: The Pirate Shore | Filed under: General | Comments Off on Tutorial: How to encrypt E-Mail with PGPIt has been a while but we’re back with some tips for protecting your privacy online. In this post we will explain how to encrypt your e-mail, so all of you can exchange e-mails securely between one another.The more people encrypt their communications the harder it will become for bodies like the NSA to monitor everything we do.
How will this work? Very simple: lets assume that at this point in time the NSA collects a couple of thousand encrypted e-mail everyday, this is a minor nuisance to them as they have to decrypt these e-mails by brute-force, which costs them quite some computing power.
Now imagine that they intercept millions and millions of encrypted emails everyday, they would be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of computing power they’d need to crack all those encrypted mails. So lets make life harder for the internet spies and massively encrypt our emails! It is a short and simple process and comparable to adding an email address to your contacts.
So lets get right to it:
Encrypting E-Mail on Mac OSX
What will I need?
- A Mail Client (Apple Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird)
- GPG Tools for Mac (Download here)
- A PGP add-on for your Mail Client (Enigmail for Thunderbird, GPGMail for Apple Mail)
After you have downloaded everything you need, we can get started. Note: For this tutorial we assume you have already set up your Mail Client with the e-mail addresses you wish to use and encrypt.We will start by launching the GPG Tools application.
The first thing you want to do is press the ‘New’ button in the top left corner of the application (you can also press ‘cmd N’ or go to ‘Key > Generate…’), to generate a new key for your email address, this will open a little window asking you to fill in your Name (this is so other people can find your public key by your name, more on this later) and your E-Mail address.
After you have filled out the form make sure you check the ‘Upload public key after generation’ box and press ‘Generate Key’.
The application will start loading (depending on your computing power, this might take a while) and after some time ask you to fill in a passphrase, this passphrase is very important since you will be using it to encrypt/decrypt messages you send/receive, so make sure you keep it safe and don’t forget it (Important: don’t share this passphrase with anyone).
Repeat this process for every email address you want to use with PGP encryption.
Congratulations, you now have generated both a Public and Secret Key to encrypt your email with. You now might wonder why you need two keys and why one of them is public, don’t we want secrecy?
Yes, we want secrecy and with this method we will achieve it. This is how the public and secret key combo works:
Lets assume we are writing an encrypted email to adam@somemail.com and Adam has already generated both a public and secret key for his email. So, when we are sending him an email, we use his public key (which we got from the public keyserver, how to do this will follow) to encrypt the email. Adam check his email and sees that we have sent him an encrypted message, he now uses his secret key to decrypt (unlock) the email we have sent him and can read it. When Adam wishes to reply to the email he then encrypts the mail with our public key and we will be able to decrypt it with our secret key.
Pretty simple right?
The question most of you will have right now is: how do I get the public key of my contacts?
This is a very easy on-time process. In the GPG application, go to ‘Key > Search For Key…’ or press ‘cmd F’ now just type in the Name or E-Mail address of the person you are looking for. A window will open with a list of relevant search results, just check the ones you want to add and press the ‘Retrieve Key’ button. This proccess can be quite time consuming depending on the amount of contacts you want to send encrypted mail to.
Now that you have collected some public keys from your contacts you can start setting up your Mail Client to work with PGP.
This step is fairly simple.
Enigmail for Mozilla Thunderbird has a pretty straight-forward setup wizard which will only take one or two minutes to complete. In case Enigmail can’t find the location of your PGP, just tell it the path to the GPG Tools application.
GPGMail for Apple Mail is part of the GPG Tools suite we have downloaded earlier, therefore this add-on does not need any additional setup. You can start sending and receiving encrypted emails immediately.
That’s it! You are now able to protect your privacy by sending encrypted E-Mail. Now help the world protect itself from mass surveillance and teach your friends & family how to encrypt their E-Mail or just refer them to this tutorial.
Encrypting E-Mail on Windows
Note: We don’t have access to a Windows computer, therefore the instructions will not be as detailed as the ones for the Mac tutorial.
What will I need?
- A Mail Client (Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird)
- GPG4Win (Download here)
- A PGP add-on for your Mail Client (Enigmail for Thunderbird, Outlook Privacy Plugin)
After you have downloaded everything you need, we can get started. Note: For this tutorial we assume you have already set up your Mail Client with the e-mail addresses you wish to use and encrypt.
We will start by launching the GPG4Win application.
The first thing you want to do is generate a new key for your email address, this will open a little window asking you to fill in your Name (this is so other people can find your public key by your name, more on this later) and your E-Mail address.
The application will start loading (depending on your computing power, this might take a while) and after some time ask you to fill in a passphrase, this passphrase is very important since you will be using it to encrypt/decrypt messages you send/receive, so make sure you keep it safe and don’t forget it (Important: don’t share this passphrase with anyone).
Repeat this process for every email address you want to use with PGP encryption and don’t forget to upload your generated key to the public keyserver.
Congratulations, you now have generated both a Public and Secret Key to encrypt your email with. You now might wonder why you need two keys and why one of them is public, don’t we want secrecy?
Yes, we want secrecy and with this method we will achieve it. This is how the public and secret key combo works:
Lets assume we are writing an encrypted email to adam@somemail.com and Adam has already generated both a public and secret key for his email. So, when we are sending him an email, we use his public key (which we got from the public keyserver, how to do this will follow) to encrypt the email. Adam check his email and sees that we have sent him an encrypted message, he now uses his secret key to decrypt (unlock) the email we have sent him and can read it. When Adam wishes to reply to the email he then encrypts the mail with our public key and we will be able to decrypt it with our secret key.
Pretty simple right?
The question most of you will have right now is: how do I get the public key of my contacts?
This is a very easy on-time process. In the GPG4Win application, use the search function and type in the Name or E-Mail address of the person you are looking for. A window will open with a list of relevant search results, just check the ones you want to add and press the ‘Retrieve Key’ button. This process can be quite time consuming depending on the amount of contacts you want to send encrypted mail to.
Now that you have collected some public keys from your contacts you can start setting up your Mail Client to work with PGP.
This step is fairly simple.
Enigmail for Mozilla Thunderbird has a pretty straight-forward setup wizard which will only take one or two minutes to complete. In case Enigmail can’t find the location of your PGP, just tell it the path to the GPG4Win application.
Outlook Privacy Plugin offers a simple set-up wizard which shouldn’t cause you any problems.
That’s it! You are now able to protect your privacy by sending encrypted E-Mail. Now help the world protect itself from mass surveillance and teach your friends & family how to encrypt their E-Mail or just refer them to this tutorial.
Notes:
– Are you stuck? Or are some things not clear to you? Feel free to ask us for an additional explanation!
– If you have more detailed knowledge on how to set up PGP for Windows, please let us know what is missing in our tutorial.
– Linux tutorial coming soon!
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