Sending encrypted emails (externally)

Private.Ki not only secures internal communications but also enables you to send encrypted emails to people who don’t use Private.Ki.

If you'd like to send an encrypted email to somebody outside of Private.Ki, you need the public PGP key of this recipient, because PGP encrypts emails with the recipient's public key. (Likewise, if you would like to receive encrypted emails from an external sender, they need your public key.)

Getting the recipient's public PGP key

The easy way: Automatic import

You can ask the other person to send their public PGP key to you as an attachment to an email to you.

Private.Ki automatically detects an attached public key and gives you the option to import it:

Just click on Import, and the public key will be imported automatically:

From now on, you can easily send encrypted emails to this recipient: See below.

The manual way: Key upload

You can also manually import keys which you have as a file on your device.

Go to Settings:

Click on Key Management:

Click on Import:

The key import window opens:

Now enter the email address that belongs to the public key that you'd like to import, and either paste or upload the file with the key:

Then, click on Import.

After successful import, the confirmation looks like this:

Now let's send an encrypted message to this external email address:

Sending encrypted messages

After you've imported an external public key, it's easy to send an encrypted message to this email address:

Just click the Compose button:

As soon as you enter the email address of a recipient whose key you have already imported, the Encrypt setting is automatically selected:

Click on Send - and the email will be sent to the external recipient with PGP encryption.

How your encrypted external messages are received

After decryption, the recipient can read your email just normally - like you typed it.

If the recipient uses, for example, Thunderbird, the software will show that the message is encrypted:

In detail view, Thunderbird confirms that this message is PGP-encrypted: