SixSigns Blog

eMail has become without a doubt one of the most important communication tools in this day and age. But when eMail was introduced, the Internet was still a safe place to be. This has changed rapidly, as more and more cruel individual abuse eMail for their highly questionable “business ideas”. Still, a lot of people treat eMail as a “safe” way to communicate and send passwords and critical information in plain text over the Internet.

Fortunately, there are easy steps to make your eMail communication safe and secure.

Get a Digital Certificate for eMail

The meaning of a eMail Digital Certificate is used to verify that the sender of an eMail is actually from the owner of that eMail-Address and not from somebody else. At the same time you can use the very same Digital Certificate to encrypt the message. In other words, your first step is to get yourself a Digital Certificate.

There are a couple of places to get a Digital Certificate, but I have found that Thawte, owned by VeriSign, offers a valid and free Digital Certificate for eMail. As by the definition of Thawte this means;

[Quote]

thawte has recognized that all individuals have the right to secure communication,. Therefore, the thawte Personal E-mail Certificate is offered absolutely FREE of charge in order to promote a culture of trust on the Internet.

A thawte Personal E-mail Certificate:

• allows you to sign and encrypt all your personal e-mails
• signs e-mail so that the recipient is able to verify the e-mail address that the message originated from - this inspires trust in those who receive your e-mail communication
• encrypts e-mail to prevent anyone except the intended recipient(s) from gaining access to the message contents. This assures information privacy and protection while in transit

[/Quote]

So, let’s go ahead and Click here to get your Personal E-mail Certificate now (If you are on a Mac use Safari to browse to this page!). There are a couple of steps involved, but most of it should be self explanatory. First, you will need to Login and get yourself an account. If you got more then one eMail that you want to secure you can request a certificate later on for every eMail address.

Once done, you should request X.509 Format certificate. Depending on your need you can choose the software you use. If you are on a Mac and want to use the certificate for Entourage, Apple Mail or alike then choose “Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird, Netscape Communicator/Messenger”.

Click on next until you get to the “Certificate Extensions” and “Accept the Default Extensions”.

Choose “2048 (High Grade)” to encrypt your public key.

After that you are finished and you will receive, after some time, a eMail from Thawte with the confirmation of your generate key.

Log back in to the Thawte site and download your certificate by clicking on the “view certificate status” link on the left side. Here you are then able to download and install your certificate (On a Mac you simply click on the “type” of the certificate and Safari will install/import the certificate to your Keychain application).

Configure your eMail application

Since we use Apple MacOS X with Entourage we are showing how to configure Entourage to Mail Security. But it should be almost the same steps for any other application or platform.

Edit your Account (Tools/Accounts) and choose “Mail Security”.

(this is how it looks like after you selected your certificate)

To select your certificate simply click on the “Select…” Button. In the popup window you should see your eMail certificate (if you have more eMail certificates choose the appropriate one for your account). Do the same for the “Encryption” part.

Now you are ready to send signed and even encrypted messages to the world. Now the next time you send a message you are able to choose if you want to sign your message or not (I choose to sign every outgoing message automatically). In any case, Entourage tells you about the status of your message.

At the same time you can also encrypt the message. But encrypting a message only works if you have stored the recipient eMail address as well and could verify it. The simplest way to do this is to have the person send you a eMail, you then can add their certificate to your Keychain and save it for future references. Once confirmed you will be able to sign and encrypt the message to the sender.

We hope this small guide helps to make your eMail communication more secure and the Internet a safer place. Feel free to ask us some questions or comment on this post by leaving a comment below.

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