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People sometimes don’t understand when they send a private email to an individual, it really isn’t private. Email by design is passed through servers, world wide, in clear text which is easy to intercept. Securing these messages isn’t simple. For any email security most users have to install stupid bulky encryption software that takes over your computer and is too confusing and complicated for an average person to understand. GMailEncrypt hopes to lower the learning curve of email encryption, while adding a layer of protection to your correspondence.

GMailEncrypt is created as a Greasemonkey script that runs in FireFox that levels encryption technology on a novice level. All you have to do is install the script, which is a click of the button assuming you have Greasemonkey installed and then generate security keys. After the keys are generated, it is important that you share your public key (NOT YOUR PRIVATE KEY) with anyone your are emailing so they can understand what you sent.

Although this is not the strongest encryption you can find it has many benefits, such as that the script only decrypts the message on your workstation on demand and never on the server. Also the script is kinda snappy. Using AES/RSA encryption, it takes about 1 second per thousand characters you type.

Some small drawbacks are that key generation can be confusing (The need to be two random, prime numbers) and encrypting your email server level kinda defeats Google’s kick ass (and Big Brother-esque) indexing.

All in all this is a great first step to entice people to encrypt their communications, and then step up to more robust and complex solutions.

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