Encrypting your E-Mails is a very simple and easy task. This tutorial will show how you can encrypt your E-Mails by following just a few steps. We will be using “Thunder Bird” which is a free E-Mail application that’s easy to set up and customize – and it’s loaded with great features! Apart from that we will also look over “Enigmail” which is one of the Thunderbird extensions that helps you to secure emails. It enables you to write and receive E-Mail messages signed and/or encrypted with the OpenPGP standard. Sending and receiving encrypted and digitally signed E-Mail is simple using Enigmail. “Pretty Good Privacy” (PGP) is a data encryption and decryption computer program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication signing, encrypting and decrypting texts, E-mails, files, directories and whole disk partitions.
Prior jumping to encrypting E-Mails you must know the terminologies as “PUBLIC KEY”, “PRIVATE KEY” and “DIGITAL CERTIFICATES”. Public key is the key to lock or encrypt the plain text, and where as private key is to unlock or decrypt the cipher text. Public key is published over servers or send to intended person via E-Mail via private key is kept secret. Neither key will do both functions. A digital signature is basically a way to ensure that an e-mail is authentic and it has not been altered in any way since that person created it.
You can even learn how to encrypt your E-Mails by following a few simple steps mentioned below: