Private encrypted email

 public key cryptography for the mentally challenged

To prevent others from accidentally reading your private email while it is in transit to a friend, encrypt it. 
Or if you are one of the world's unfortunate living under a regime which spies on all communication, encrypt it.
Or if you live in a terrorist state which hates freedom, encrypt your email.

There are many techniques to do this, some of which make your email appear to be ordinary browser traffic. But for most people the easiest and readily available technique is simple public-private key cryptography. I have drawn up a little chart shown at right to give the basic idea behind this. It is pretty straightforward.

Okay, first a little rant:  You should use a Linux, BSD, or any other good free non-proprietary non-corporate non-monopolistic non-spyware non-privacy violating operating system. But if you insist upon using a Micro$oft or A$$le  system (why?), then download GPG, read the documentation there, and use that. For sensible computer users however, get ubuntu or debian and follow the instructions there for downloading and installing a powerful, free, versitile, and non-spyware, non-privacy violating operating system. Once you have done that, then -

Follow the instructions below

  1. Download Seahorse or Kpgp: click menu--> run command and in the window which appears, type apt-get install seahorse.
  2. Let's assume you chose to use Seahorse. From the menu start it running, and click on Key -> create a new key -> PGP key
    1. Fill in the blanks as you wish in the window that opens up
    2. Click on Advanced Options and choose the maximum size available This ensures that your encrypted messages will be rather difficult to break into. It can be shown mathematically that some schemes (RSA for example) can be broken into much more rapidly than can be done by a simple brute force (repeated guessing) attack. Long passwords and large key sizes help minimize this risk.
    3. Click 'Create' and give yourself a password for your new key. Choose a password that you will remember and which is fairly long - a short sentence is a good choice and add some numbers and symbols in there too. The idea is to make your password pretty much impossible to guess or to break using an automated password guessing system.
    4. Your public-private key pair will now be created. Wait a bit, the algorithms involved take time to execute.
  3. Give your public key to a few friends. To do this, open up Seahorse, Kpgp, or whatever program you used above:
    1. Click on your key.
    2. Right click on it, select "export", and save your key to a file.
    3. Copy the file to a floppy disk, a USB flash card, or whatever, and give it you your friends to copy OR email the file as an attachment to whomever you want to be able to send you encrypted email. Obviously the first method is more secure, but the second is pretty good too.
  4. Now add your new key to your email client. Here I will assume you are using Evolution, but Kmail and email clients have very similar procedures:
    1. Open Evolution Mail and click on Edit -> Preferences.
    2. Choose the email address you wish to use, then click Modify -> Security
    3. Enter the PGP ID of the key you just created. If you look at the list of keys when you open Seahorse, you will see that there is a unique ID number beside each key. Select the one you just made and enter it into the box in Evolution.

That's it. Now when anyone sends you email encrypted with your public key your email client will automatically decrypt it after asking you for your password. Of course your friends can also generate a public-private key pair, give you their public keys, and you will then be able to send them encrypted email. It really is pretty easy in this way to protect your basic human right to privacy of communication as defined by Article 12 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

Enjoy.