Edward Snowden is fast becoming a household name. His NSA revelations brought shock and awe into American households, as individuals and families started to realize that their communications were not quite as private as they had originally thought. To partially calm some of those nerves, I’d like to offer a few easy ways that you can encrypt your webmail to at least try and maintain some semblance of email privacy in a world filled with snoops and spies.
Before we get started, it’s important to understand what types of encryption is available to you when you’re using webmail like Gmail, Hotmail and others. In general, people will use either public-key cryptography or secret key cryptography, depending on the application and how comfortable people feel with the process of sending emails in each case. Some people feel that public-key cryptography is very secure, while other people like to maintain the password part of the equation privately, so they use secret key cryptography.
