Tag: sign

What is it? Signing is essentially showing the recipient that your email address is verified by a certificate authority (CA) (hence legit) and that you are presenting that certificate to the recipient so that they can use the public key in it to encrypt the reply back. Once both parties are using each others' public keys to encrypt the messages and their own private keys to decrypt it, no one in between can intercept it and make sense of it without those private keys that are stored in your computer/phone. Why do it? Encryption: If this is a private email (which email always is, otherwise we use forums), the contents should remain PRIVATE. There is a long route your email takes from your keyboard to the destination screen! It can be intercepted anywhere in between by either hackers, phishing scams, data miners, government, your email provider that snoops on the contents of your email and creates a profile of you, sells it to advertisers...