Like all good email clients, Claws Mail can handle PGP encryption for your outgoing and incoming  email. But like many of the advanced features of Claws Mail, PGP is added with the help of plugins. Once you load these plugins, encrypting and decrypting email is simple. Let’s take a look and see how it’s done.

Loading the plugins

The first thing you have to do is to load up the correct plugins. Loading plugins is simple with Claws Mail. Click on the Configuration menu and select the Plugins entry. A new window will open up where you select the plugins you need to load. There are three plugins specific to PGP that you will want to load up (you have to load them one at a time.) They are: PGP/Core, PGP/inline, and PGP/MIME. The PGP/Core plugin is a neceisity as it is the core of the Claws Mail PGP system. The other two plugins handle the PGP feature in different ways. If you want to send your encrypted messages as attachments you will use the PGP/MIME plugin. If you want to send your encrypted messages in line you will use the PGP/inline plugin. Simple.

Configuration

Once you have the plugins loaded you can go to the Configuration menu and select Preferences. If you scroll down in that window you will see GPG listed under Plugins. Click on GPG and you will the few options available for this plugin. The options available are:

• Automatically check signatures
• Use gpg-agent to manage passwords
• Store passphrase in memory
• Grab input while entering a passphrase
• Display warning on startup if GPG doesn’t work

That’s it. The default values should work just fine. Now, let’s move on to actual use.

Encrypting and signing an email

After you compose an email you will need to encrypt and/or sign the email. If you click on the Options menu you will see the Privacy System sub-menu. Click on that to reveal all possible choices. The choices listed will depend upon what plugins you have loaded. If you load all three of the plugins you will have three entries in the Privacy System menu:

• None: Use no encryption
• PGP Inline: Encrypt your message inline.
• PGP MIME: Encrypt your message and add it as an attachment.

Figure 1

After you make your choice go back to the Privacy System sub-menu and select Sign and/or Encrypt. Once you have everything set click the Send button. The first thing you will see is an Encryption warning. You can uncheck this so it doesn’t appear every time. After you click through this warning a window will appear where you can select the encryption key to use. If you only have one (and it is associated as the defalt key for the address) you may not see this window (see Figure 1). After you select the key, click Select (which will dismiss the Select Key window) and then click the Send button to send your email.

Decrypting email

This is the easy part. NOTE: In order to use this feature you have to have the keys imported that you are to use. If you have a key imported into your systems’ PGP all you will have to do is enter the passphrase for the key. When you do that the incoming mail will be decrypted. Simple.

Final thoughts

I have found the Claws Mail pgp system to be the best of breed of any email client I have used. I think you will find it as easy to use and as reliable and powerful as I did. The only downfall is that there isn’t a plugin for importing keys. Maybe that will come in the future.

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Basically it comes down to being complicated and a nuisance that is not worth the effort. Comodo Secure Email is a free for personal use product by popular software developer Comodo that removes the complexity attribute from the process. Secure Email is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows XP or Windows Vista and fully integrates itself in popular email clients such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird.

A software wizard will walk the user through the process of creating a digital certificate that will be used for an email address. It simply means to select the email address that should receive the digital certificate. The user enters his name and email address and the certificate will be automatically generated.

Secure Email will start signing outgoing emails digitally right away and encrypt them if the contact has provided the user with an public key as well. The whole process is automated and the user in front of the monitor does not have to worry about acquiring digital certificates or exchanging public keys.

Secure Email can also scan all mails in the email client for encrypted emails that the user might have received in the past. One of the biggest advantages of Comodo Secure Email is the automatic integration in the mail client. It integrated itself automatically on a test client that used mail accounts from various email providers and Mozilla Thunderbird.

Another interesting feature of Secure Mail is the ability to create unique single use email certificates even without knowing the recipients public key. The recipient has two options to read the email: Install Comodo Secure Email or read the email message on the Comodo website.

Secure Email Features:

• Simple and Easy to use. Fast set-up and automatic encryption and signing of outgoing emails makes it easy for even non-technical users to enjoy private and secure messaging
• Session certificates take the application beyond traditional PKI infrastructures by allowing users to encrypt messages even when they don’t have their contacts’ email certificate installed.
• Web reader service – on-line interface allows your recipient to read mail that you encrypted with a session certificate
• Encryption when your mail client doesn’t support encryption – Comodo SecureEmail operates at the network layer and provides encryption and signing capabilities if your mail client doesn’t have encryption in its feature set
• Automatic certificate exchange and installation – SecureEmail’s notification system ensures both sender and recipient are instantly updated with each others certificates
• Built-in wizard for easy sign-up and installation of Comodo E-mail Certificates (Home version allows home and personal users to quickly sign up for a free Comodo email certificate. Pro version of the software enables business customers to easily purchase Comodo corporate e-mail certificates.)
• Automatically imports relevant mail settings from all major mail clients to ensure the fastest possible set-up time
• You’re in control – granular configuration of settings means the application will work to your security preferences, not the other way around

The biggest advantage of Secure Email is the ease of use. It requires virtually no configuration after adding the email accounts to the system. The only change that users might want to make is to disable the email popup notifications that are activated by default. This can be changed in the program’s settings.

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Before you can use the email encryption you need to generate some encryption keys for every email address that you use. Don’t worry the process is really easy and straightforward. The first email address can be added during the first start of Ciphire. The process looks like the following:

• Enter the email address that you want to add
• Ciphire generates RSA, DSA and ElGamal Data
• A verification email is send to the email that you have added in the first step
• Get new mails from your mail client (in my case Thunderbird). The verification email should be amongst the emails. Open it, wait a few seconds and the account creation switches to the next step.
• You can either export the key if you are using Ciphire on different computers (home, work, notebook..) or finish the account creation process

Ciphire uses private and public key encryption. The private key is of course private and used to encrypt messages that have been encrypted by other users with your public key. This means of course that the user who is sending you encrypted emails needs your public key to encrypt them. Most encryption applications had a very complicated method of sending your public key to other users.

Ciphire on the other hand handles this task for you. Whenever you send someone an email Ciphire is automatically checking an Internet database that contains all public keys from all email addresses that are using the system. The email is also digitally signed which means that your account is protected against identity theft as well.

The encryption and decryption process is working automatically. If you send someone a mail and Ciphire detects that the other user is also using Ciphire your email will automatically be encrypted. If you receive an encrypted mail it will be decrypted before it reaches your inbox.

This is by far the easiest way to encrypt emails. It should be noted that Ciphire only works with emails that are received and send from within an email client. If you use webmail accounts you should add them as pop3 accounts to your mail software as well to be able to send encrypted messages with them.

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