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Google does not have the best track record when it comes to the confidentiality of users, but from time to time they do something amazing. Back in April, the company He began testing through encrypted electronic traffic exchange of electronic letters For users' enterprises. On Thursday, officially released this functionA field if you have a Google workspace through work, now you should be able to send emails protected by E2EE, even if you send an email outside Gmail. This should allow you to send emails that only you, the recipient and IT department that controls your account, can access.
E2ee is very important For those who want to ensure that their communication is completely private. To simplify the complex technology, encryption of something like an electronic letter, in fact, means attracting the entire code to something completely unrecognizable. In order not to break this, you need a “key”. In the case of E2ee Gmail, you have a key, the recipient has a key, and anyone, your Google Workspace account has a key. The keys to decipher these emails are not preserved on Google servers, so even Google should not be able to access your encrypted letters. You can send things such as the company's confidential information or medical information protected by Hipaa, not worried about encouraging your eyes, intercepting the message.
The only bummer here is that at present E2EE in Gmail is limited to business accounts. Nevertheless, there is a way to send safer messages by a standard Gmail account-do not expect that protection at the E2EE level.
E2EE for Enterprise Gmail users
Credit: Google
To send E2EE emails through your Enterprise Gmail account, you need to make sure that your working space administrator includes it. As soon as they do this, you need to say Gmail that you want to send your e -mail with E2e. To do this, open Gmail and select the “complex” to launch a new email. Select “Safety of Messages”, then, under “additional encryption”, select “Turn on”. From here you can make your message, as usual, adding your recipients to the list.
If your recipient is another user of Google Workspace, the message will be automatically deciphered when it reaches their mailbox. If they are not a Gmail user, they will not be able to decipher the email in their client. Instead, they will receive a link that opens the “limited” version of Gmail. As soon as they enter the system, the message will expand the decoding, and they will be able to read and answer it from this limited window. Please note that the IT department can choose that all E2EE messages are open to limited Windows Gmail, even if the recipients are users of Google Workspace.
Use confidential mode to send “safe” messages for free
If you do not have an enterprise account, in fact there is no way to send E2EE emails through Gmail. To do this, you need a special encrypted e -mail service, Like a protonNevertheless, you can add an additional level of security to your messages before sending them.
What do you think so far?
To do this, start a new email to Gmail, then select the “confidential mode” from the parameters. This mode blocks recipients from sending, copying, printing or downloading emails. You can also expire of the message after the established period of time, including one day, one week, one month, three months or five years, as well as password protection. If you choose the latter, Gmail automatically generates the password and send it to recipients through SMS.
These additional means of protection are certainly useful in sending confidential information on Gmail, but they are imperfect. Again, this is not through encryption, which means that you can intercept and read messages sent in this way. More practically, there is nothing that does not prevent users from photographing the message using another device – although it can be said with E2EE messages.
If you do not have an enterprise account, I would avoid sending something too important through Gmail at present. You better use the special E2EE platform, such as Signal, WhatsApp or Imessage.
