Geekblok

Many people use Google’s email service Gmail nowadays. But, like with any webmail service, how is your privacy guaranteed? According to GoogleWatch, Gmail is too creepy. Luckily, you can do at least something to gain some privacy back by encrypting your emails.

The geeks who use mutt or pine (or thunderbird for the matter) as their mail client probably have seen that you can easily add gpg plugins to encrypt (and decrypt) emails, yet with web based solutions, this gets a little harder. FireGPG, a Firefox extension, makes it possible to use GnuPG (gpg) for Gmail aswell. You do need to have gpg installed on your system (and of course you need Firefox), but after that, it works fairly easy.

The plugin basically works for all web based mail clients (Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, etc.) yet with Gmail, you’ll get a set of extra buttons, making it yet a little easier to use. Just select the text when of your email and hit the “Crypt” button from your right-click menu (under FireGPG). Select the recipient’s public key and hit the Ok-button. Now you’ll get the encrypted text that you can copy and paste into the email.

Too bad not many people see the need for email encryption and will throw the non-argument “if you have nothing to hide, you don’t need encryption” right back at you. Please do try to explain the need for encryption to them and start using it for everything!