David Guest wrote: > FYI. > > The road warrior's smtp server. > http://lifehacker.com/software/email-apps/how-to-use-gmail-as-your-smtp-server-111166.php
Yup, it works a treat. Here is what I have been doing for the last 6 months of so, with 100% reliability so far: 1) Create a user account for myself on Google Mail 2) Grab the Windows portable version of the Thunderbird email client with Enigmail pre-installed from PortableApps - see http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/thunderbird_portable 3) Install that on a 1GB USB memory stick (it prompts you to create a GPG key pair etc - a completely painless install which takes about 2 minutes). 4) Configure it to use the Google Mail as its SMTP server for outgoing mail and as its POP3 server for incoming mail, and to always use encryption when sending email. 5) Install all your friends' and associates' GPG public keys. 6) Start sending and receiving encrypted email. Of course, everything that you send and receive goes through the Google Mail servers, but it is all encrypted, so that Google has no idea what you are saying in all those messages (although the subject lines are not encrypted, but the message body and all attachments are). If someone steals your USB stick, they can't read any of the incoming or outgoing encrypted messages stored on it because they don't know the passphrase to unlock your private key (i.e. all encrypted messages continue to be stored in encrypted form in Thunderbird, and are only ever decrypted on-the-fly when you read them, but only after you provide your private key passphrase when you first start PortableThunderbird and every x minutes thereafter). Voila, portable encrypted email, hosted by Google, who learns very little about you except for the subject lines of your messages and the email addresses of the senders and recipients of your email - but nothing about the actual content of those incoming or outgoing messages. Oh, and there is no absolute need to keep back-ups of the USB memory stick, since Google keeps copies of all your outgoing and incoming messages on its servers for you (in encrypted form). If you lose the USB key, just get another one, set it up again as per the above steps, download all your incoming messages again via POP3. Oh, you need to configure Thunderbird to send copies of outgoing messages to yourself, in encrypted form. That way you can recover copies of all your sent messages as well from your Google inbox. The ultra paranoid can take an additional step of storing all of the above inside an encrypted partition on the USB memory stick. I use TrueCrypt (see http://www.truecrypt.org/ ) for this purpose, but it is probably overkill, and has the downside of requiring admin privileges on the host machine in order to install the TrueCrypt device driver. The only other downside is that many corporate firewalls block the ports which Google mail uses for its SMTP and POP3 services. A possible solution is to tunnel the POP3 and SMTP through HTTP on port 80, but I haven't explored that yet. But it works fine in most situations in which Internet access via a Windows PC with a USB port is available, such as Internet cafes or someone else's laptop with a wifi connection. Cost: about $30 to $60 for a USB memory stick. Nil cost for any of the software, nil cost for any of the Google email accounts. Um, just don't tell Google about any of this, OK. It's just between you and me. Tim C _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
