How to VERY QUICKLY, start sending and receiving encrypted emails.

I discovered how to do this just now... it is not a guide to online security, or authoritative in ANY WAY. But it took my all evening for me to work out how to do this, so in order to save people time, and to get people sending emails that nobody can get their prying eyes into, read on....

The instructions below describe how to send your first encrypted email using a Windows PC, browsing with Firefox, and collecting and sending emails with Outlook 2007. But I reckon it shouldn’t be too different doing this in Thunderbird or under Internet Explorer.

If you use webmail – e.g. Googlemail, Yahoo, Riseup, etc., then you should first set up a mail client (such as Thunderbird or Outlook Express) to handle all of your emails first and then try and get the emails encypted. It is well worth doing this if you get the chance just for usability’s sake.

1) Get a “Digital Signature” for yourself. This isn’t a signature like you have in your emails at work with a phone number and other personal information. It’s a piece of information that identifies you digitally. I tried a few software programmes for free to create a signature, but none of them would work with Outlook 2007. Forget telling me that Outlook is corporate crap by the way...it’s quite good, and besides, it’s a free copy (courtesy of the Pirate Bay). To get a digital signature that worked in Outlook, I got one from  http://www.comodo.com/products/certificate_services/email_certificate.html. I do not know much about this company, but it’s probably as secure as any other. Fill in your details, and you will get your Signature. Follow the instructions on the screen, and do some background reading if you want to – Wikipedia is a good place to start (Google threw up a lot of very old websites and old software which was pretty irrelevant).
2) I got my certificate and thought...where the heck has it been saved to? Luckily I found it... it had been added to Firefox itself! To find your signature (if using Firefox 3), go to Tools > Options > View Certificates > Your Certificates. Here you will see your signature, from The UserTrust Network. Anyway, click on the name you gave yourself when requesting a Digital Certificate from Comodo, and click on the button “Backup”. Here, enter the password you chose, and save it somewhere easy to find – e.g. your desktop.
3) Now, load up Outlook 2007, and go to Tools > Trust Centre > Email Security. From here, import your Digital ID that you saved. You will want to automatically sign all of your email, and to encrypt them when you are communicating with anyone who you hold a Digital ID for - click the appropriate options.
4) What I did to check it was all working, was to send myself an email with a few words in the main body of the text (the message itself – not the subject), and sent it to myself, and to another email address where I could look at the email that had been sent. The email I sent myself I could open correctly and read; there was a little icon on the email message which indicated it had a signature and was signed, and was encrypted. The email that I copied (CC’d) to another email address that I have access to, I could open, but could not read – the message contents were just a load of garbage...it had been encrypted!

I do not count myself as an expert in this, and the only reason I have written the above is because I have wanted to get my mail secured for ages, and have never been able to work it out. I looked online, and it seemed like a matter of luck discovering how to go about doing it....especially when I didn’t want to spend a penny doing it... so if even one person manages to get their email signed, and then later, encrypted, then it has been worthwhile.