This is popular for businesses which have a variety of email clients in use and don't want to deploy a universal encryption service immediately, or who can't easily swap out pieces of their email infrastructure. Tutanota, Virtru and AppRiver fit into this category. These are typically add-on tools that encrypt messages using your existing email infrastructure. Gateways are still useful for businesses that either are reluctant to use the cloud or who have particular compliance reasons for encrypting their message traffic, such as a brokerage house or a medial practice.įinally, there are client-only products that supplement existing desktop email software, such as Outlook or Apple Mail. That's why gateways have somewhat fallen out of favor, especially now that there are so many other choices. While this is appealing, with all this control comes the higher pain point of getting them setup properly. Gateways offer tremendous control over how emails are processed, whether any message residue can be found on local storage devices, and how you can go about recovering passwords. Datamotion SecureMail and HP's Voltage SecureMail fit into this category. They require special plug-ins or an on-premises server to be setup inside your firewall to connect to your main email server. These were the first kinds of encryption products, and can still be found on the market. This category is appealing for smaller networks or places that see an immediate need for encryption and want to get started quickly. Hushmail has been around for more than a decade, while ProtonMail is relatively new and still in an extended beta. We looked at Hushmail and ProtonMail in this category. If you are already using a hosted email service, you would need to replace that provider with one of these services.
Typically, you use the hosted provider's webmail client to have a secure connection to send and receive email. To analyze the current state of the art, we examined seven products, and found that they fall into three functional categories.įirst are hosted email services that make use of end-to-end encryption of their message traffic. And there still is a lot of end user apathy towards encrypting messages, even in spite of the Snowden saga and other object lessons in keeping messages secure. That means any encryption solution has to cover different use cases and endpoint clients. Some people prefer Outlook and many organizations depend on Microsoft Exchange, while there are dozens of SaaS-based hosted email providers, such as Google Apps and Office 365. Some of us alternate between desktop and mobile clients, or also turn to webmail as our mail client. These are all good signs that encryption has finally come of age.īut there is one remaining problem: the ways we use email has also evolved and gotten more complex. And all of the products reviewed have better control over the message traffic, such as setting expiration dates, or being able to revoke unread messages or prevent them from being forwarded once your recipient has read them. After this first communication, your recipient is able to exchange encrypted messages with you quite easily.Īpart from zero knowledge encryption, modern products make sending and receiving messages easier, with advances like an Outlook or browser plug-in that gives you nearly one-button encryption. Just provide them a passphrase to decrypt their message and to compose a reply to you, or in some cases they can read the message by just authenticating themselves. Today, many products have a "zero knowledge encryption" feature, which means you can send an encrypted message to someone who isn't on your chosen encryption service. In the past, recipients of encrypted emails had to share the same system as the sender, and many email clients were difficult to configure. While things have improved considerably since then, encrypting messages is not as simple as it could be, and requires careful study if you want to have truly private communications that can't be viewed by your competitors - or your government. I once co-wrote a book on enterprise email where I likened email encryption to a "sucking chest wound." That was in 1997, when you had to do all the encryption key management on your own, a daunting task to say the least.
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