14 Archiving e-mails in an encrypted form

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14 Archiving e-mails in an encrypted form

You should also archive your important - and hence possibly encrypted - e-mails in only one way: encrypted.

Of course you can simply save a clear text version of your texts, but that is actually not required. If your message was supposed to be secret, it should not be stored on your computer in clear text. Therefore you should always store your encrypted sent e-mails in an encrypted form!

You can probably already guess the problem: To decrypt your archived (sent) e-mails, you will need the private key of the recipient - and you don't or will ever have it ...

So what to do?

Very easy: You also encrypt to yourself!

The message is encrypted once for the actual person you are writing to - e.g. Adele - and once more for you, using your own public certificate. This way, you can later make the e-mail legible using your own private key.

Gpg4win will automatically encrypt each encrypted message to your own certificate. To do this, Gpg4win uses your sender e-mail address. If you have multiple certificates for an e-mail address, you have to select the certificate to encrypt to during the encryption process.

In short:

1. You have encrypted an e-mail using the public certificate of the person you are corresponding with, and used it to answer him.
2. Kleopatra additionally encrypts your sent encrypted e-mails using your own public certificate, so that the messages remain legible for you.

And that's it! At the end of the first part of this compendium, you have gained a lot of introductory knowledge about Gpg4win.

Welcome to the world of free and secure e-mail encryption!

For an even better understanding of how Gpg4win really works in the background, we recommend that you read the second part of the Gpg4win compendium. It contains even more interesting stuff!

14 Archiving e-mails in an encrypted form

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