I had an attorney ask me about secure email options and didn’t really know what to tell him a while back. Then I was communicating with an overseas business person who tries to be a capitalist in a country emerging from communism. I looked at his email address. The domain was “keptprivate.com“.
I decided to check it out.
This isn’t a sponsored link or affiliate link… it’s just to answer some questions friends asked.
And I thought you might need it for your business or clients if you’re handling potentially sensistive emails that need confidentiality.
It’s $9.95 for 3 months…$40 per year.
· One Email account
· Full Featured Web Email over SSL
· POP / IMAP and SMTP all over SSL
· 100 MB of Storage Space
· Secure Java-Based Chat
Even if my attorney friends clients didn’t want to pay for the service. They could send him a secure private message using this secure online form.
My question of course is “how do you send secure messages to people who don’t have this service”? (such as my lawyer friend would like).
Emails to addresses outside of keptprivate.com are normally transmitted as plain text across the Internet. Of course if you are sending a message to another KeptPrivate user the message never leaves the KeptPrivate server.
KeptPrivate’s web interface lets you send a message to a non-KeptPrivate user that never leaves the KeptPrivate server. When you are done composing your email you can check a box called “Send Private Message” and fill in a password. Instead of the message being sent across the Internet only a short message is sent telling the recipient that you have sent them a private message. When the recipient clicks on the link in the short message they are taken to a screen where they must enter the password you assigned when you sent the message. If the passwords match the recipient gets to read the message and view/download any attachments. The recipient can also reply to you through the web interface, again with the message never being sent across the Internet as plain text.
Additionally, if I am not a KeptPrivate user but I would like to send a private message to a KeptPrivate user I can go to www.keptprivate.com and access a page that will let me send the message.
An attorney could tell a client the password to use up front and not have to communicate passwords all the time for this system to work well. Knowing most clients though, they’d forget it. That’s where the problems would creep in.
I have another friend who keeps asking me to use PGP. Finally an explanation about how PGP relates to these webmail services…
PGP is intended for secure person-to-person communication and it involves public key exchange and management. PGP was not designed or intended for Web email systems and it does not work well in the Web environment because all decryption requires access to your private key. Your private key should never be sent over the Internet. You can use PGP on top of the security features provided by KeptPrivate.com for the ultimate in security.
Interesting.
Do you need secure email at your office?
Image courtesy KeptPrivate.com
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