Any way to send an encrypted email when other end has no software installed

workaccount

Hi,
As per title. I want to send some financial details around to a few people via email but they don't have PGP installed or anything.

I just installed FirePGP there for firefox and it was a little bit of messing - It's not feasible to get the other end to set all that up.

Any other solution I could try?

Thanks a mill.

bnt

The way PGP works, you definitely need it on both sides of the connection: that's how it works. You encrypt a mail with the recipient's public key, so that only they can decrypt the mail with their private key.

If you don't want to go down that route.another option is the use of encrypted attachments, such as ZIP files. For example 7-Zip Portable can be installed to any location and run from there, even a USB Key, with no admin rights. It will create 7z files with AES-256 encryption, which can be attached.

However, there is no reliable way of hiding the sender and recipient of an email from ISPs or corporate mail servers, so if there's ever any question about what you were sending, that information could be a problem. Email, even with PGP, is no way to do any insider trading, for example! :eek:

workaccount

bnt wrote: »

The way PGP works, you definitely need it on both sides of the connection: that's how it works. You encrypt a mail with the recipient's public key, so that only they can decrypt the mail with their private key.

If you don't want to go down that route.another option is the use of encrypted attachments, such as ZIP files. For example 7-Zip Portable can be installed to any location and run from there, even a USB Key, with no admin rights. It will create 7z files with AES-256 encryption, which can be attached.

However, there is no reliable way of hiding the sender and recipient of an email from ISPs or corporate mail servers, so if there's ever any question about what you were sending, that information could be a problem. Email, even with PGP, is no way to do any insider trading, for example! :eek:

Thanks. The zip files would definitely be more feasible. It's an email I'm sending around to a few housemates on bills payments due every month. It would be handy to give them my account details in every mail! They will probably just end up writing the details down somewhere instead now.

I need to look into further again how safe doing business is via giving account details out. I always used to give them out on the likes of adverts and then became paranoid - turns out Jermey Clarkson got screwed when he gave out his bank details on air and asked anyone to attempt to take money from him.

Maybe I should just check out my banks insurance policy - might be just easier to take the risk.

Thomas_S_Hunterson

This'll do it: http://osxdaily.com/2007/05/02/quickly-encrypt-a-file-with-openssl/

Save the data as a text file, encrypt it and send it.

bnt

Oops - forgot this was the UNIX forum for a minute, so scratch the idea of using only Windows-specific tools. The Linux version of 7-Zip is called p7zip (command line "7z")