Online communication through email has become a part of our daily life. Often we send and receive sensitive and personal information through email messages. For example, you can send the login information for some account to your friend through a plain text email message. This sensitive information would be visible to anyone who has access to your email account, for example, a hacker or a snoopy colleague. To prevent hackers from reading these sensitive email, you can encrypt the email messages that you send or receive. This is where Enlocked comes in – it can encrypt the email messages in transit, rendering them unreadable except by the intended recipient from their email client.
Enlocked is perhaps the easiest way to get email encryption for your email account. It works with all the major email services – Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, Hotmail etc. It supports most of the platforms, email clients and web browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Microsoft Outlook, Android, iPhone, Blackberry etc. It uses the well known PGP standard to encrypt the email messages.
Enlocked is available for many platforms and browsers. When you visit their website, you can pick the appropriate download link to download and install an edition for your device or browser. Personally, I chose to install it in Mozilla Firefox. The Enlocked add-on for Firefox does not require to restart the browser and you can start using it right away. After the installation, now when you open your email account (be it Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL), you would see an extra button labeled Send Secured when you try to compose a new message. This button matches with the original look of the Send button for these email services.
Sending an ecnrypted message using Enlocked is a no-brainer for everyone. Just compose your message like you do usually, then instead of clicking the Send button, click on the Send Secured button. When you send or receive an Enlocked encrypted message, Encloked.com asks some information from your email service provider. In general, it asks for access to your name, email address, language and email service. You would get a popup message asking for your approval and you have to approve it before you can send or receive encrypted messages.
Of course, later if you want, then you can revoke Enlocker’s access to your email account from your email account settings. When someone sends you an encrypted message and you try to read it, it would take a little longer than usual. This is because the Enlocked add-on connects with Enlocked.com to verify whether you are the original intended recipient of that mail and to decrypt the message. The decrypted email message soon appears in your browser, with many lines boasting about Enlocked appended to the original message.
While Enlocked certainly uses high standards of encrypting and decrypting the message – saving them from the snooping eyes of hackers and online stalkers, it sends the message to be decrypted or encrypted to its own Enlocked.com servers. The message encryption or decryption is not done at the local computer, as a result a man-in-the-middle attack can still reveal the original message to a dedicated hacker. So if you can trust your sensitive information with Enlocked.com systems, then you can enjoy sending and receiving PGP encrypted email message for free. You can find the download links for various platforms and web browser extensions on the Enlocked webpage at http://www.enlocked.com.