The use of Gmail is now ubiquitous. Unfortunately, it’s easy to read email in transit and some national governments abuse their power to read email in transit. I have always been using PGP to encrypt email, and today I thought I’d put down how to communicate with me, or with your friends, using signed and encrypted mail. I think the biggest reason email encryption is not being used is because it’s hard to set up. So, here is a simple, step-by-step tutorial that is easy to follow.

Installing and creating a key

1. Install Mailvelope . Click “add to chrome”, pop-up appears, click “add”
2. little padlock icon appears on the top right of your Chrome
3. Click little padlock icon, click “Options”
4. At the bottom, click “Generate key”
5. Fill in Name (you can put fictitious name, it’s good!), Email (the email you want to use, e.g. Jon.Doe@gmail.com), put in a password that you will remember. This password is never sent anywhere. It’s used so that when you want to read email that is encrypted to you, the encryption keys can be accessed.
6. Click submit, wait for the generation to finish.
7. Setup is done!

Continue reading Setting up encrypted mail in Chrome and Gmail →