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Email Clients with Encrypted Archives?

Posted by Cliff on from the yet-another-cool-feature-idea dept.

jasonbrown asks: "If your like a lot of us, you want to keep all your good email for later viewing. Then again, who wants to have all that personal stuff laying around when some higher power decides to dig through it. I was wondering if the Slashdot community knows of any good, preferably linux compatible, email clients with an encrypted archive to keep your old email away from prying eyes."

3 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Simple: Encrypt the filesystem. by Marijn · · Score: 5, Informative

    Really simple, just use an encrypted file-system. Either in a partition or via loopback in a file (convinient for backuping).

    Save, Simple, and you can use any email software you want.

    --
    -- Aji con Todo!
  2. Outlook by Howie · · Score: 4, Informative

    Evil nasty bad MS Outlook has had this ability for at least the last few versions (97 onwards I think).

    Depending on how much grief other people reading your mail is going to cause (legal, or merely embarrassing), it's worth noting that several countries already have laws requiring you to give up the keys to your encrypted mail in certain situations, and others are considering similar laws.

    --
    "don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
  3. useless by dutky · · Score: 4, Informative
    Unless the e-mail is encrypted during transmission there is little point in worrying about storing it on your local machine in an encrypted format. Since the transmission format is wide open you have to assume that it has already been captured and read by anyone interested in snooping around your life. If they already have copies of some of the clear text that resides in the encrypted archive, it will be child's play to find your encryption keys and decrypt the entire archive.


    If you are planning on doing stuff you would rather not have extra evidence of later, don't talk about it over e-mail! If you are conspiring with other folk stupid enough to send incriminating information over e-mail, you have bigger problems to worry about. If you are already sending all your e-mail in an encrypted form, you simply need to keep the encrypted e-mails in the archive as well.