Sometimes web-based, you can't import a certificate into your web-based email, so then what do you do when you want to send an encrypted email?

Here we have a program called CryptoLab. CryptoLab is a free cryptology program put out by these guys in the UK, and here's your link [www.ejc-crypto.co.uk]. So, what this simply does is it's basically Notepad, and it will allow you to type in text as if it was a notepad, and you type in anything you'd like to write, for example, here I'm writing an email to Mike asking if he'd like to film The Jolly Roger.

Now, what is also very very cool about this product is you have the ability to choose from several different ciphers, so you're not stuck using one cipher or a known cipher. This program uses well known Cryptology standards, so all you have to do is you put in a key, a passphrase, in this case I'm using a very small one called 'JollyRoger', but it's very tiny; use a longer key obviously. But you can pick which cryptology standard you want to use - the most popular one is probably AES; DES used to be the most popular one, and then there were thoughts that the NSA had a way to crack it, so everybody pretty much uses AES right now.

But what's also pretty cool about this tool is you can type your message, encrypt it, cut, paste out of it, so you could cut your encrypted message out, paste it right into Gmail, email it to somebody and then they will take it, cut it out of Gmail, paste it into this program, and then simply decrypt it.

But this also has the ability to send out SMTP email, so you can send it out directly from this tool. Now whoever you are sending it to will have to will have to cut and paste the cryptology out and plug it into this you'd have to use the same encryption and the same key that you used to decipher the message, so you're going to have to tell them "Hey, this is the key", and I don't suggest you send it to them in an email because that's kind of defeating the whole purpose of using this program.

This all started because I, well - thankfully know I work in a company where the administrator of our email system is very responsible, I trust him, and I don't think he'd ever get in any trouble, but it wasn't always like that. At an older company, I used a company called PrivyPad, but now they're charging for PrivyPad, so now I found this - CryptoLab - it also has the great ability to export this to a USB key, so you can have this as a single executable on a USB key; very simple, you can plug it into any computer, encrypt and decrypt, and now you've got a way to encrypt and decrypt your email, for web-based email.

It's a great little product, you should check it out; once again it is called CryptoLab - you can download it from here [www.ejc-crypto.co.uk].