Tag Archives: email

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OpenPGP is an encryption technology that is primarily used to secure email, although sadly it is not as widely used as one might like.

Doing my bit to counter the “Summer of Surveillance”, and in a bid to make encryption more omnipresent (and because I had a need for this for a client), I quickly put together a plugin that adds OpenPGP support to Elgg.

The plugin does two main things; provide a mechanism where by a user can upload the public key for their registered email address, and secondly, provide an email handler that will attempt to encrypt any outgoing messages using that key (where possible).

Enjoy!

» Visit the project on Github…

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A long time ago, in a galaxy not too far away, I took part in a JISC funded research project. The purpose of the project was to investigate and develop solutions for some of the issues associated with securing email.

It was a fun project to be involved with (not least because I got to pretend to be a student again for a little while), and I believe the solution we built – the Secure Email Proxy – was a good one with a lot of potential.

The project finished in 2003, and the website (hosted on an old Sun Pizza box in my lab) has long since vanished, along with the code for the project. I think this is a shame, so I’ve stuck my old development code up on Github. The proxy was under active development since I left the project, but I’ve not go access to the code. If you do, then please feel free to fork and update it.

Anyway, the proxy works by sitting on your local machine between your mail client and your mail server. It manages keys on your behalf, and encrypts/signs/verifies/decrypts messages and attachments on the fly as email passes through it. This means that you don’t need to have any native plugin to work, and it’ll work with virtually any mail client.

Enjoy!

» Visit the project on Github…

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email-sending-letter An email bridge is something that allows messages from Elgg, group discussion messages, direct message notifications etc, to be directly replied to from your email client.

I needed to get something like this implemented for a client project, and thankfully there was a third party open source plugin written by Michael Jett which did most of the work for me.

The Jettmail project is still under active development, and at time of writing was missing two key bits of functionality that I needed:

  1. Direct reply-to email functionality (you could send messages from an email link, but direct reply-to functionality was missing).
  2. Direct person to person message support.

I have made my own modifications to Jettmail to add this functionality, and also created a plugin to rewrite the reply-to email line appropriately for each object.

» My modifications to Jettmail…
» Jettmail reply-to plugin…