I’ve been working with a user this week that has to send and receive encrypted emails and it occurred to me that ALL our email customers have this ability though most of you might not know it. I thought I’d take a moment to show you the feature and how to use it.
Most of our users don’t have a need to send encrypted email all the time, so it never occurs to them to utilize it on the rare occasions they might. You probably didn’t know you can use “on-the-fly” encryption to send sensitive information to individuals, taking advantage of this high security when you need it, and otherwise just sending email as normal.
When might you want to send an encrypted email?
- If you’re transmitting anything that contains company secrets, or information of a sensitive nature you don’t want lying around someone’s unguarded inbox folder.
- Sending any personal identification information.
- Sending any medical or patient information.
- Emailing someone your credit card number.
- Anything you want to remain on YOUR email server, not the recipients.
How do you use it?
If you have hosted exchange, we can setup your email for always-on encryption, but most customers find that cumbersome, which is why they don’t use it. However, you can ALSO use on-the-fly encryption to encrypt one individual email that contains important information without setting all that up. It’s REALLY easy.
Look at the new email I’m compiling below:
I need to email my social security number to a vendor for some reason, but I certainly don’t want that lying around in their inbox for anyone and everyone to see. Notice the highlighted word at the end of the email subject? You simply type the word “encrypt” within a set of brackets in the subject line. That tells the server this is sensitive information and to treat it accordingly. For reference its simply [encrypt] added to the subject. That’s it. Then you compose your email as normal.
What does the recipient see?
Rather than getting the information displayed on-screen, the recipient receives an email informing them they’ve received an encrypted email, with a link to access the email on your server, NOT on their server! It looks like this image below.
They can save this email forever and be able to access the email at any time, but the information itself isn’t saved on their computers or on their network.
Once they click the link, if its the first they’ve ever received an email from our servers, it will ask them to fill out some information. This only happens once. All subsequent emails will bypass this screen. The first time they click an encrypted link from you, it will look like this:
After this one-time identification process, they will just see this screen instead.
After logging in, they will be directed to the message you sent them, similar to the image below.
From this screen, they can read your message without it ever being transmitted or stored on any server besides your own. Additionally they can reply back and even send attachments back to you within the reply, all while keeping the communication encrypted, so even though they don’t have encryption on their email servers, your server can encrypt the email for them and keep the sensitive data within your own server 100% of the time.
No more “I didn’t get it”
If it’s an important email you HAVE TO BE SURE gets to the recipient, you’ll be glad to know the server emails you back when the message has been received by the recipient’s server AND when the message has been viewed by the recipient. This isn’t a feature they can control or turn off. It’s automatic. You know immediately when they received and read your message.
Questions?
If you’re a customer with questions about encrypted email, or just want to test it out, just email us and we’ll login remotely and show you how to do it. If you’re a blog reader with questions about what our hosted exchange platform is, what it costs, etc, simply go to our contact page and send us your questions. We’ll be glad to tell you all about it.