Brian made a comment today that reminded me how dumb it is that people still communicate so much over totally open email. It’s the equivalent of writing your message on the back of a postcard, and handing off to your neighbor to hand off to a friend to hand to a coworker to hand to five other people before it finally gets to the recipient.
To get the digital equivalent of putting in a (padlocked) envelope, both people have to jump through the hoops of setting up encryption software. It’s a shame none of the big tech companies have seen fit to make this a more painless process; just think of the increased adoption if AOL, Yahoo, or Google offered easy, standard encryption.
Fortunately, it’s actually not to hard to setup Mac’s Mail.app to sign or encrypt messages with S/MIME. This very detailed tutorial on How to Set Up Encrypted Mail on Mac OS X makes it seem worse than it is. The twenty minute process is pretty much:
- Get free personal certificate from Thawte
- Backup (export) the certificate from your browser
- Import the certificate into Mac’s Keychain
- Start up Mac mail and sign/encrypt messages
The one pitfall I hit was the tutorial’s recommendation to put the certificate in a new keychain, which mail couldn’t see. Putting it all in the default “login” keychain worked fine, though.
If you’ve like to join me in the world of secure email, free from the prying eyes of systems administrators, hackers, FBI, NSA, and George W himself, email me your public key and we can start plotting to overthrow the world.
