The Life of a Silicon Valley Rockstar

My buddy Zep found a cool tool that integrates FireGPG seamlessly with Gmail and posted a great description on his blog. As if there weren’t enough reasons to move your personal account to Gmail, for many of us this is something we’ve been clamoring for for awhile. In an age where identity theft is an everyday occurrence there’s no reason not to encrypt your email. Personally, I send most client correspondence encrypted for obvious privacy reasons.

I’m really impressed how easy it is to use. There’s a dashboard with a Gmail tab that’s pretty much idiot-proof. I say that with a smirk, but it’s important. If only us geeks use it then there’s not much to be gained. We probably would have found another method anyway. The beauty of this solution is in its simplicity and ease of use.

It’s a Firefox extension and pushes itself right into Gmail. I wish they’d make a solution for IE7 as well since for better or worse it’s still the de facto standard web browser. You’ll note I said it’s a firefox extension. It’s not a key manager. For that you’ll need to download GNUPG or my preference, GPG4Win which also has a file encryption plugin GPGee and an Outlook 2003 plugin, GPGol.

Although I haven’t tested it, I’d guess this will work Google Apps hosted mail as well. That makes it an ideal solution for small business users that don’t have, or want, in house encryption expertise or to bring in expensive consultants.

What are you waiting for? All the tools are free and available with 2-3 quick downloads. I’ve walked a few very non-technical clients through this process already so if you have any questions please leave a comment or contact me directly.