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Easy Email Encryption Guide

I have repeatedly told my friends and family that securing their email is the second step in securing your electronic communications, the first being to start using a privacy-aware search engine. This usually falls on concerned but overwhelmed ears. It seems hard to encrypt email. In reality, it is easy, but I have never had a simple guide that was enjoyable and simple to point my friends to so that they could encrypt their email easily. Fortunately, the situation is much better now.

Email Self-defense: https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/en/

Please, anyone who is not already encrypting their email communications with PGP/GPG based encryption. Read that guide and make it happen. It assumes that you will be using the Thunderbird email client, but you can use another one if you want. However, if you want an easy and painless approach, the Thunderbird mail client is excellent and well worth a look.

Finally, building your Web of Trust can be a difficult thing without many local friends. Keybase is changing this by having a super easy and useful way of building up your web of trust (that is, the set of people with whom you can communicate securely) using your social networks.

With these two services, you have everything you need to get set up with secure email, and at this point, you really have no excuse not to make sure that you are using secure email.