New Contact Form

In an attempt to remove all traces of my email addresses from this site, I put together a new contact form anyone can use to get in touch with me. I went a little over-the-top with security. Not only is the form SSL-encrypted, on the back-end the message is sent PGP-encrypted. (Well, GPG-encrypted to be specific.) It's not a perfectly secure system, but it's pretty good. heh.

Even though it's sort of a hassle, I wish more of my email was PGP-encrypted. I think one day a month should be "encryption day"—where people could try sending/receiving encrypted emails for fun without the social stigma. With just a little more familiarity with encryption, I think non-geeks could start using it. It's like sealing an envelope, and being as sure as possible that the person you're sending the message to is the only one who can read it. In the age of total information awareness and spam, it just makes sense to strengthen our email practices and safeguard our privacy.

The only problem I've found is that PGP-encrypted emails are impossible to search in your email client. (My client doesn't automatically decrypt messages, anyway.) So if I want to go back and find some info someone sent to me in an encrypted message a month ago, I'm out of luck. Anyone know of (or have ideas about) solutions to this problem?
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Comments

hi. just stumbled across your site and i really like it. i was wondering, how did you get that pic of the truck to "sparkle" like that? it's a brilliant effect. thanks.
by rob on Dec 10th, 2003 at 8:20 am
I like to call that effect a "happy accident". I was in a car going 80, it was very dark, the road was bumpy, the camera was very zoomed, and I had the ISO bumped up to 800. My guess is that we hit a bump that created that star-pattern during the longer exposure time. I also bumped up the levels a bit in Photoshop, b/c the exposure was a bit dark. Thanks, glad you like it!

And back to fixing PGP...
by pb on Dec 10th, 2003 at 8:42 am
ok, so car going 80mph *check*, bumpy road *check*, total happy accident *damn*.
by rob on Dec 10th, 2003 at 12:07 pm
And PGP email searching? Anyone? :)
by pb on Dec 10th, 2003 at 1:39 pm
Unfortunately I don't know the answer, but I bet http://ask.metafilter.com could help you.
by tim on Dec 10th, 2003 at 1:50 pm
Apple's mail.app has a preference checkbox that says "Index decrypted messages for searching", which suggests that it stores encrypted email in decrypted form. That probably isn't any help to you if you're not using a Mac.
by dan on Dec 13th, 2003 at 1:11 pm
Thanks for the tip. I'm using a Mac for some things--email isn't one of them. I'll look into the encryption that mail.app supports. It may be time to change clients.

Unfortunatley this solution won't work to get all of the Outlook Express users trying encryption. Maybe changes to email clients are the only way encryption will take off.
by pb on Dec 13th, 2003 at 1:35 pm
Unfortunately, it looks like setting up encryption in the Mac mail.app is still pretty complicated,

http://www.joar.com/certificates/

mostly due to the process of getting a certificate. (I agree it doesn't do you much good if you're the only one with encryption.)
by dan on Dec 14th, 2003 at 2:24 pm
Hi! You're reading a single post on a weblog by Paul Bausch where I share recommended links, my photos, and occasional thoughts.
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