Email Clients with Encrypted Archives?

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."

Comments

re: Email Clients with Encrypted Archives?

[zantrox]

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Simple: Encrypt the filesystem.

[Marijn]

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.

Outlook

[Howie]

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.

useless

[dutky]

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.

Re:useless

[markj02]

That's utter BS. There are plenty of reasons you may want to encrypt your E-mail archives even if it's transmitted in plain text. Perhaps you keep them on a laptop and worry about it getting stolen. Perhaps you use a secure VPN for getting your corporate mail and now want to secure the on-disk storage.

Furthermore, for any reasonable cryptosystem, having even tons of plaintex and encrypted text available is not sufficient to recover the key.

Get a grip

[coyote-san]

You've been watching too many spy movies...

The issue most of us face isn't somebody actively snooping into our lives at all times, it's our boss taking a peek around our system to try to find some dirt. Nothing criminal, not even acting in bad faith, but a discussion of how much the VP looked like a drunk duck or a dancing Balmer at a "rally the troops" meeting would do nicely in damaging our image with senior management.

Of course the boss could ask IT to search the mail archives kept by the company, but then they would have dirt on him! Nope, much better to make a midnight raid and 'accidently' forward the incriminating message to the topic of discussion late some night....