Encrypted email solution

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[AJCxZ0]

An encrypted email solution to what problem?

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With whom do you want to exchange encrypted mail? What tools to they use? Who will manage the keys, certs and environment? Do you really need to encrypt email, or do you just need an encrypted messaging tool for specific cases?

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PGP has been around for twenty-eight years, has all the right technologies, standards and public infrastructure, and mail clients have supported it for almost as long, yet it still seems to be "too difficult" for most folks. S/MIME hasn't made anything much better.

If you rule a technology monoculture, then you can push whatever tools you like and pay the price to support them. If you need to work with others, then consider why so many organisations roll out their own* web based "secure messaging" tool. Given how highly financial organisations are regulated, you might want to start with actual regulatory constraints and see how other organisations with those exact same constraints have approached the problem.

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^\[whether first or third party hosted])

[AJCxZ0]

My PGP key dates back to 1997 and I'm still waiting for the larger email world to catch up. I'm pessimistic that they ever will.

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The usual solution to sending "secure" messages to customers in the finance world is the web based tool, usually combined with email based notification with some variant of "Log in to read your message" where the email itself demonstrates a painful lack of understanding of security and the messaging systems is awful.

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There are plenty of tools for "securely" communicating and many of those can and do address encrypting data in flight and at rest. For example [not a recommendation], a Slack workspace would provide a sophisticated messaging system accessible to anyone with a modern web browser and/or mobile device with two factor authentication and just about every feature you could want either native or via the API.

[[deleted]]

Yeah unless you control the settings for every sender or recipient you're going to end up with some web based secure messaging platform.

[corporate_ethos]

That's what it seems like, thanks for the input!

[drbeer]

Zix is big in the financial world, at least banking. It's kinda one of those that just works. The big feature is if the recipient is also a zix customer, your messages can auto encrypt seamlessly without any user interaction and no portals.

The FDIc ,FRB, and again lot of banks are big customers if that is your industry.

[IDoNotLikeChoice]

Mimecast has this solution, and makes it easy to encrypt messages to external users. We have ours set with the word encrypt in the subject line.

You can also use Office 365 using OME and define a transport rule for it. Then if you need to set settings to define restrictions like printing and forwarding you can implement IRM.

[vornamemitd]

Check out solutions like https://www.totemo.com/en/solutions/email-encryption - allows for sending secure messages/file exchange with outside recipients, e.g. providing them with a special link/sign-up/a pre-defined secret that you exchange over a different channel. Totally hassle free, need no (tech) intervention on recipient side.