Free and EASY Email Encryption

For most of us there are a few occasions when we need to make absolutely sure that the emails we send will only be read by the intended recipient: a sensitive email to a friend, a confidential email to a colleague, a business proposal to a company, an email to a professional such as a solicitor or counsellor (see Eprivacy).

On these occasions, we wouldn't dream of writing the sensitive and confidential information on a postcard, and then leaving it around for days on a public table for anyone who came into the room to view. Although we would never do that with hard-copy, we frequently do it with electronic copy. The emails we send are often stored on our computers and the computers of the recipient. And in transit, they are delayed on servers as they pass between machines and could be read by anyone who cared to inspect them. Some companies, as a matter of course, scan the emails sent out by their workforce.

There have been encryption programs around for a number of years. These encode the message, making it virtually (and practically) impossible to read by any snooper. Although ways of securing the privacy of your electronic communication have been around for sometime, they have not had the successful take up that they ought to have, for one or more of four main reasons. Some may have been too expensive. Some may have been too technical for the average user, involving an installation of software followed by the creation of encryption keys. Some of the 'easier' ones may have had weak encryption.

However, perhaps by far the biggest weakness is that many of them required the recipient of the email to have similar software installed in their machines if they were to decrypt and read the message. "Excuse me, I am going to send you a confidential encrypted email, and oh, by the way, you need to go to http://www.downloadthissoftwareandistallit.com/, download and install the software and create the encryption keys, and then you will be able to read my message" doesn't feel too user friendly does it.

Stealth Message is a secure messaging system designed for communicating sensitive and confidential information. It protects your privacy, allowing you to communicate in complete confidence with friends and colleagues, and at the same time, overcomes all of the usual objections to usage mentioned above.

Stealth Message requires only that you and the receiver have access to e-mail and a browser.

All you need to do is make sure that you have agreed on a shared code to access messages sent through this system. Contact your friend or colleague prior to sending the message and agree on a secret code that only the two of you will share. You may always change it later. It is recommended you do this by telephone, in person, or through an alias e-mail address. The system does not issue you a new email address and allows you to use your existing e-mail accounts to receive messages.

The system works in a 3-step process.

1. You create your message, encrypt and store it.

2. Recipients are notified by e-mail that there is a confidential message for them stored on the Stealth Message servers.

3. Recipients click a link back to the Stealth Message site, enter a private code, and access the message.

In addition to enabling the easy encryption and decryption of emails, I like the way that Stealth Message has built lots of other security safeguards into the system. And it is all free. For example, in addition to storing encrypted messages anonymously, it allows you to set two useful options for individual emails. You can choose to have an email self-destruct at a particular time, and you can choose to prevent particular emails from being copied and pasted into another document. It also prevents the forwarding of messages, so that you confidential email cannot be forwarded to another computer but remains on the secure Stealth Message server and is only accessible by the intended recipient. It cannot end up stored on someone else's computer.

Free, Automatic, Encrypted Backup with Mozy

I used to live in fear that my computer would crash. It contains so much that I wouldn't want to lose. Having already lived through the trauma of lost business accounts, family photos, work documents, and crucial emails, and endured the pain of: "Daaaaaad! It took me hours to download all that music!" I was determined not to go through that again.

"Buy a backup disk," I hear you say. I did. Guess what? It worked for a while and then crashed too.

And then, I stumbled across Mozy. Mozy is a great free little program that you can download and configure to back-up whenever you want it to. You get an initial 2GB of free space (and can purchase more at a reasonable price if you need to in the future). All data is encrypted before being backed up then delivered to the Mozy servers via a secure connection. It works quietly and efficiently in the background protecting what you value.

The initial configuration is very helpful (much more helpful than my backup disk that cost me over £100). You simply select either particular files or folders, or, more intuitively, the kind of files that you want to backup - selecting from types including email, accounts, documents, presentations, spreadsheets & databases etc.

And it works. Why not find out more, or try it for free?

One of my friends said that after she had downloaded Mozy, it wouldn't initially connect. We soon worked out that this was due to Norton, not Mozy. We soon got Norton to recognise Mozy (Mozy has a FAQ answer explaining how) and now she knows her data is secure too. And, OK, depending on your internet connection, the initial saving of data may take a bit of time, but once that is complete, backups usually only take seconds, as only new or changed data has to be backed-up.