Thursday, 22 April 2021

Sending confidential emails in Gmail

We are pretty used to sending encrypted emails in office or work environment with outlook or other mail clients and PKI and S/Mime certificates in place.

I was trying to explore how to make my email from Gmail more secure (of course can't ask for moon on a free service). Look what I found Gmail does offer confidential mode. Here are the settings.


First feature observed here is that you will not be able to forward, copy, print, or download such emails. 

You could send the mail without passcodes where another Gmail user can open it without passcodes but the ones on other services would be mailed a passcode to open the mail.

If you choose SMS passcode then you would get a screen to enter the recipient phone number on hitting send (would not work if your don't have the number this option will not work).



An option to set the expiry on mail (the mail auto deletes) is also present.

Although this feature looks more like a two factor authentication rather than encryption, something is better than nothing.


PS - Thanks Google for considering such a feature on personal email service.