Protecting only ONE email acct in Thunderbird

[phkhgh]

I've read a few suggestions & posted on Mozilla's forum & KB on how to protect email in only ONE acct in Thunderbird. No suggestions. So far, most methods aren't good if other users have administrative privileges, etc, or aren't secure at all, or are bit of a pain.

I'm not worried about the CIA - just keeping personal medical correspondence, etc., out of view. Most messages won't be stored in the email client for long.

Could use an encryption app (like TrueCrypt), but never used one. Read the manual - seems like a bit of trouble for this. How / where is the key stored - that is, unless you want to type it in every time?

Suppose I could just not d/l the msgs for the private acct into T-bird, and only access the acct by webmail, entering (but not storing on PC) the password manually. Then delete msgs off the server.

Maybe there are easier / more practical solutions?

Thanks!

 

[Tedster]

no email is truly safe unless encrypted. I suggest encrypting either the source documents or the computer. Bear in mind, encryption can be dangerous to data, so ensure you have a backup that is no encrypted.

 

[DelJo63]

look for PGP solutions or an email client that provides PGP.

the typical PGP solution is:

• write the email body text
• encrypt it using PGP
• copy/paste the data into the body of the email
• click SEND to deliver

EVERY correspondent who is to receive your encrypted email MUST also have:
1>PGP and
2>your public key to decrypt the received message.

you send the public key to the receivers in a separate email
(and I ZIP it to make it obscure)

 

[phkhgh]

Thanks Tedster & Jobeard. Appreciate the info - may come in handy.

However, for this situation, encryption would be over kill & likely out of the question. No doctor / office staff is going to use PGP & my public key.

My real concern was just keeping other users (with administrative privileges) on this PC from easily seeing the correspondence in ONE email acct, & mainly in Thunderbird. Your suggestions would work, but... As I said, I'm not worried about preventing someone w/ advanced skills or tools from recovering deleted msgs, etc.

Maybe one easy solution is change the password on that one acct (AT&T_Yahoo mail) so PW can't be seen even from the Master Acct (I think). Then, only use web mail for that acct & delete read msgs from the server. Just take the email client out of equation.

If that thinking is flawed or if there are other simple options (apart from sending encrypted msgs), I'd appreciate additional comments.