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Why Secure Email Simply Doesn’t Work
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Posted: 22 Dec 2010 03:00 AM PST

Email by its very nature is completely insecure. I’m not talking about the email systems like Yahoo Mail, Gmail and Hotmail that all have secure logins, I’m talking about the emails themselves. When an email message is transmitted over the internet, there are any number of ways it can be intercepted. Should you be worried about this? No, because your email is but one of billions transmitted daily. I could say the chance of your email being intercepted is one in a billion and literally be correct.

Still, there have been initiatives to try and get email secure. The most popular is Enigmail for Mozilla Thunderbird and Seamonkey which uses the OpenPGP standard.

The problem with secure email is that while the idea is sound, in practical application it’s nearly worthless.

First, none of the big webmail providers support PGP via any web interface, meaning you must use a mail client.

Second, secure mail is not easy nor has it ever been. Even though Enigmail takes a ton of hassle out of setting up secure email, it’s still difficult and not a 1-2-3 process.

Third, and most importantly, it’s doubtful anyone you know uses secure email, so even if you chose to use it, you can’t send encrypted messages to them because they have no way to decode it. And if they saw your "public key", they’d probably think it was a virus.

How do you secure your email when it’s inherently insecure?

Let’s say for the moment that for whatever reason, you want to use email that has at least some means of added security to it.

The simplest way to do this is to use email as the messaging system but not have it contain the message. How do you go about doing that? Have the message hosted elsewhere with Pastebin.

Go to www.pastebin.com, type your message, set as private, then send the link to the message to the recipient of your choosing. Recipient receives mail, clicks link, reads message. This is more secure than email because the message was never transmitted via email and stayed in Pastebin the whole time. For added security you can set the message to expire, even as little as 10 minutes after posting it.

It’s also quite cool that there are add-ons for Pastebin for Firefox and Chrome if you decide to use it on a regular basis.

Pastebin above all else is the absolute easiest way to secure messages because it requires no logins, it’s stupidly easy to use, you don’t have to change your email address and you can use it only when you need it.

For the paranoid, there are two things about Pastebin that aren’t secure. The first is that Pastebin offers no SSL to speak of, and the second that on send of the Pastbin link to the recipient, the link to the message is within a transmitted email and does have that one-in-a-billion chance of being intercepted, copied and loaded in a browser. This would only concern you however if you’re batsh*t insane paranoid about the messages you send.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Why Secure Email Simply Doesn’t Work

Print Only What You Need From Any Web Page With PrintWhatYouLike.com

Posted: 21 Dec 2010 07:00 AM PST

Whenever you print a web page, you typically get everything on it: images, ads, etc., most of which you probably do not need or want. Excluding these unwanted items from your print job will not only save you money in the form of reduced paper and ink, but will also print faster. To easily do this, check out PrintWhatYouLike.com.

This free site works entirely in the browser and allows you to make on the fly modifications to any web page and then save or print it. You can selectively remove images and ads, increase the font size, resize elements and lots more. There are shortcut tools which allow you to easily do common tasks, such as remove all images so the process isn’t overly tedious and can avoid the need to paste into Word for editing before printing.

A service like this is handy to know about, so keep it in mind the next time you print.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Print Only What You Need From Any Web Page With PrintWhatYouLike.com