On Nov 9, 2004, at 4:49 PM, Anne Cartwright asked: > If one uses the digital signature, will this keep the spoof from being > sent or just notify the receiver that it was from you?
A digital signature on the mail does not stop someone from spoofing your address, but it can let the recipient know whether the message actually came from you. There is no known way of spoofing both a return address and a secure digital signature without using millions of dollars of high-powered computing equipment. (If the NSA has it in for you, you might be in trouble.) Several people have given pointers to Web pages explaining digital signatures and encrypted e-mail, so I won't go into detail about the nuts and bolts of it. PS/ If anyone is inspired to go out and get a key pair, make sure to avoid Safari. Apple has poorly set it up so Safari automatically enters the private key into your keychain, and I've not found a way to export it--and I tried really hard. This isn't a problem, if you're going to do all your e-mail on one machine with Mail.app forever. But, most of us will eventually want to export those keys to another machine or program. Mozilla works well. | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be November 23. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
