In part 1 , Part 2 and Part 3 of this series we learned all about e-mail encryption and how to download, install a program called GpG4win and create a security key. If you haven’t read the previous articles, check them out now.
Let’s get started on sending and receiving encrypted e-mails.
In order to send encrypted emails you need to send your public key to the person that you are going to communicate with, to do this follow this steps:
- Open Kleopatra program as we did in previous step,
- Right click on your newly created certificate (in my case DarknessGate certificate) and click “Export Certificates.”
3. Give your exported certificate a meaningful name and save it with .asc extension, you can open it using WordPad program to view its content.
4. Now, to send your public key certificate to your friend. You can open your preferred email client and copy the entire certificate file (which we already opened using WordPad) and paste it inside the email, or you can simply send it as attachment (this is the best method).
In a previous step we have described how to export our public key certificate from within Kleopatra to an external file with .asc extension and how to send it to using our email.
In this step we are going to reverse the operation and receive a public key certificate from a friend and import it to our Kleopatra program, so we can use it to encrypt our emails and send it to the person who owns this certificate.
Open Kleopatra program and click on “Import Certificates” button as follows:
A browse file dialog appears, select the certificate/file you want to import (public key certificate) and click Open; if the import was successful, a success window appears telling you this:
Click “Ok” to exit the window, the newly imported certificate appears in the main Kleopatra program under the “Imported Certificates” tab.
There is also an MS Outlook express plug-in for encrypting and decrypting emails automatically from within the Outlook email client. It supports nearly all available versions of MS outlook (2003 , 2007 , 2010 , 2013) , To send encrypted emails using Outlook follow these steps:
1.Compose a new email in Outlook and address it to the person you are writing to (Iam using Outlook 2010).
2. Click on the GpgOL tab in the message bar and click the “Encrypt” button.
3. After clicking the “Encrypt” button, the select certificate dialog appears asking you to choose your encryption certificate and the signing type (OpenPGP OR X.509). Select the options as displayed in the following picture:
I chose to encrypt my email using OpenPGP method. In my case, I am sending the email using the email account which I used to create my certificate (webmaster@darknessgate.com) so it appears by default, the receiver’s public key certificate also appears (Adele) as I already imported it to my Kleopatra program, click “OK” to continue, the entire message will be encrypted as follows.
Click the “Send button” and you are done.
Remember: I used the receiver public key certificate to encrypt the message.
In the final part of our series, we’ll learn how decrypt and encrypted message that you’ve received.
~ Nihad