How to encrypt your email using freenigma
August 26th, 2006 by Ross McKillop |
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From freenigma.com -
freenigma adds privacy technology (with strong e-mail encryption) to your favorite webmail service (gmail, hotmail, yahoo etc)
Today, all your e-mails are stored and sent around the planet in plain text. And today you have no control over what happens to your private or business e-mail conversations and you can’t prevent others from reading them. Get your privacy back! Encrypt your private and business e-mails to protect your freedom, privacy and your business secrets.
This tutorial will take you step by step through setting up and using freenigma
Things worth mentioning up front:
So you still want to install/use freenigma - great - visit freenigma.com and request an invitation. note: as of this writing freenigma is in beta, and may be offering a limited number of invitations. If you have any problem requesting an invitation please use the Contact Simplehelp form and I’ll send you an invitation - until I run out). After you receive your invitation ….
- Select the link found in the “Freenigma invitation” email and you’ll be taken to a setup page. Enter the appropriate information in the provided fields then click next > to continue.
- Now it’s time to choose your Freenigma password. As you’ll soon see, it’s important to choose a password that’s both difficult to guess and easy for you to remember. After you’ve entered in the required info, click next > to continue.
- Freenigma will now drive home the point that your password should be stored somehow - with not one or two reminders, but three.
- Now it’s time to install the Firefox plug-in. Follow the usual steps - and if you get stuck at all, review the included tutorial by Freenigma to help install the plug-in.
- Don’t forget to restart Firefox for the Freenigma plug-in to take effect
- After you re-launch Firefox you should notice a small box in the bottom-right corner of Firefox. Enter your Freenigma user name (which is the email you use when signing in to the Freenigma service site) and then click ok
- In the very bottom-right corner of Firefox you should now see the Freenigma icon. If you hover your mouse over the icon you’ll get a status indication. Clicking the icon will change the current status (from enabled to disabled or vice-versa). Right-click (Mac users ctrl+click) the Freenigma icon and select to freenigma.com… to finish setting up your account.
- After you sign in to freenigma.com, select My Contacts from the top menu bar and then select the Invite people tab. In the Search for existing freenigma users field, enter in the name or email address of someone you know that uses Freenigma. If you’re just trying the service out and don’t know anyone using it (yet) feel free to add ross.mckillop@hotmail.com (I can’t promise immediate responses using that address).
- Select the newly added contact and then click the Trust button.
- When you compose a message to that contact and want to encrypt it, click the (new) Encrypt button in your chosen webmail client (the screenshot below illustrates Hotmail)
- Enter your Freenigma password when prompted
- The message is now PGP encrypted. Click Send as you would any other email.
- When the recipient receives that email, they’ll be able to click Decrypt
- Then enter their password…
- And the message will be decrypted.
One Response to “How to encrypt your email using freenigma”
By Lefty Penny on Dec 28, 2006 | Reply
I like the looks of this software but, I would like to know how a version was developed for firefox, probably less than 10% of the potential. Why wouldn’t you have gone with the majority of potential using IE.
Lefty