RE: [PHP] Encrypting email

At 9:49 AM -0400 4/21/09, Bob McConnell wrote:

From: tedd

At 8:39 AM -0400 4/21/09, Bob McConnell wrote:

I have been asked by a product manager what our options are for encrypting email messages with sensitive information. We are currently using PHPMailer to send email. What can be done to encrypt those messages? Can it be done without OOP?

From within a php script, it's not a problem to encrypt a text string

and send it as email. The sending of the email and the encrypting the contents are two different issues. You may want to look at it that way.

But can it be done so the recipient's email client will automatically open and decrypt the message? How do you make it as seamless as possible for them, preferably so they don't even realize the message was encrypted? Bob McConnell

Bob: At some point both parties (sender/receiver) must know (agree) what the encrypting mechanism is. If I was writing a script to do this for a client, I must have control over both the send and receive scripts and then I could deliver the email to the client seamlessly. They would never know what happened in the background. However, if your client wants to send stuff to anyone and have it encrypted without knowing who the receiver is going to be, then there is no way to do this. Both the sender and receiver must agree on the encrypting mechanism either by providing passwords OR by you having access to both the sending and receiving scripts. As I see it, there is no other way. Cheers, tedd -- ------- http://sperling.com http://ancientstones.com http://earthstones.com