ProtonMail with full PGP Support and Address Verification

Martin Brinkmann
Jul 26, 2018
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ProtonMail announced two new security related features and improvements yesterday available to all users of the secure email provider.

Address Verification is a new security feature that leverages ProtonMail's Encrypted Contacts feature. Encrypted Contacts allows you to trust public keys of contacts so that the contacts data is encrypted and digitally signed.

ProtonMail states that no one can tamper with the data once it has been trusted; this eliminates the risk associated with a compromise of the ProtonMail service and the sending of fake public encryption keys to read confidential messages.

protonmail trusted keys

The default state on ProtonMail is that the service distributes cryptographic keys needed for communication; this was done to make the process as straightforward as possible.

When ProtonMail users use the new security feature, use of specific keys can be enforced which the ProtonMail server or anyone else cannot change or tamper with.

To configure trusted keys for a particular user on ProtonMail do the following:

  1. Go to Contacts.
  2. Select the contact from the list that you want to configure trusted keys for.
  3. Click on the advanced settings gear icon next to the email address.
  4. Toggle Trusted Keys to on, and select the key from the list of available public keys, that you want to trust.

Trusted senders have a special icon attached to their email address to indicate the enhanced security status.

ProtonMail users can check out this help article on the ProtonMail website for additional information.

Full PGP Support

The second new feature that ProtonMail launched improves PGP Support. The cryptography that ProtonMail uses is based on PGP.

The two new additions to PGP support are:

  • Option to import public keys from contacts to send PGP encrypted emails to non-ProtonMail contacts.
  • Export your public ProtonMail PGP key and share it with non-ProtonMail contacts so that they can send you PGP email to your account.

ProtonMail launched a new public key server that should make key discovery even easier. For ProtonMail customers, the process is automatic and Address Verification can be used to make it more secure. For non-ProtonMail users, it is now possible to grab the public key of ProtonMail users if they could not retrieve it through other means.

The address of the public key server is hkps://api.protonmail.ch. Note that it cannot be accessed through the browser. Public keys can be downloaded directly by using https://api.protonmail.ch/pks/lookup?op=get&[email protected]

Now You: Do you encrypt your email?

Summary
ProtonMail with full PGP Support and Address Verification
Article Name
ProtonMail with full PGP Support and Address Verification
Description
Secure email provider ProtonMail launched address verification, full PGP support, and its own public key server yesterday.
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Ghacks Technology News
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Comments

  1. JMGG said on January 19, 2012 at 8:25 am
    Reply

    You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?

    1. BalaC said on January 19, 2012 at 9:42 am
      Reply

      I think its thunderbird

    2. Martin Brinkmann said on January 19, 2012 at 10:15 am
      Reply

      It is Mozilla Thunderbird.

  2. Salaam said on September 24, 2012 at 9:52 pm
    Reply

    Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.

  3. Claud said on December 19, 2012 at 2:08 am
    Reply

    If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.

    1. Lynda said on February 12, 2013 at 3:37 pm
      Reply

      THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!

    2. Chad said on November 20, 2018 at 4:24 pm
      Reply

      Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…

    3. Ivan X said on January 21, 2021 at 4:50 pm
      Reply

      Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.

  4. Andrew said on October 26, 2013 at 7:06 am
    Reply

    This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)

  5. Charles said on December 7, 2013 at 7:23 pm
    Reply

    Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.

  6. garth said on November 7, 2014 at 7:13 pm
    Reply

    You are a god – thank you!

  7. Faisal said on February 9, 2015 at 10:09 am
    Reply

    thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)

  8. Simon said on March 24, 2015 at 11:36 pm
    Reply

    Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers

  9. Olu said on April 14, 2015 at 1:35 pm
    Reply

    Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
    Thank you

  10. Coenig said on July 23, 2015 at 7:36 am
    Reply

    Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)

  11. Fali said on January 20, 2016 at 4:19 pm
    Reply

    Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.

    1. MIki said on January 10, 2019 at 11:54 am
      Reply

      I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!

  12. Christina said on January 20, 2016 at 6:14 pm
    Reply

    Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007

  13. Oz said on July 22, 2016 at 3:20 pm
    Reply

    Great tip! Thanks!

  14. Tracy said on September 1, 2016 at 4:48 pm
    Reply

    Worked for me, too – thank you!!!

  15. shawn said on September 9, 2016 at 10:25 am
    Reply

    It’s Worked for me, too
    thank you very much!

  16. Jari said on October 31, 2016 at 11:53 am
    Reply

    I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!

  17. Michel H said on November 30, 2016 at 11:08 pm
    Reply

    Thank you so much. Solved!
    Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
    Thank you again. M

  18. Ziad Bitar said on January 9, 2017 at 2:00 am
    Reply

    This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.

    Thanks.

  19. Anonymous said on February 15, 2017 at 5:24 pm
    Reply

    Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.

  20. Rochelle said on March 6, 2017 at 11:59 am
    Reply

    Thank you, this worked !!!!

  21. anom1234 said on May 20, 2018 at 11:20 pm
    Reply

    Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!

  22. JC said on October 12, 2020 at 2:14 pm
    Reply

    Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!

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