Everyday use
The honest answer is: almost nothing changes. Here is the "almost".
Receiving
Nothing to do. Every message you open gets one line at the top telling you what was
established about it. Most of the time it says the mail is ordinary, and you carry on.
The desktop application can also watch your inbox and tag messages as they arrive, so the
verdict is visible in your normal mail program's list without opening anything. It only ever
adds a tag; it never moves, marks as read, or deletes anything.
Sending
Two ways.
Deliberately, per message
In the browser plugin and the Outlook add-in, two buttons appear when you write:
Sign and Encrypt. Sign proves you wrote it. Encrypt also
seals it so only the recipient can read it — available when they have a published key.
Automatically, for everything
The desktop application can protect everything you send without you thinking about it. It
sits between your mail program and your provider: your mail goes out the same way, but signed
on the way past, and encrypted automatically whenever every recipient has a key.
This is the setting most people end up using, because protection you have to remember is
protection you will forget on the day it matters. The
automatic protection guide sets it up.
If anything goes wrong, your mail still goes. The rule the sending path
follows is: never lose a message. If a signature cannot be made, or the network is
unreachable, the message is relayed exactly as you wrote it rather than being held or
dropped. You may lose the protection on that one message. You never lose the message.
What the other side sees
If they also use ProtectMyMail, they see a banner. If they do not:
- A signed message looks completely normal, with a short reference line
at the bottom, below a
-- separator. Most mail programs treat that as a
signature block and tuck it away.
- An encrypted message is not readable to them. They see a block of
characters and a line explaining what it is. Only encrypt to people you know can open
it — the plugins only offer it when the recipient has a published key.
Replying and forwarding
Replies work normally. Your reply gets its own signature; the quoted text of the original
is not re-signed, which is why quoted lines are ignored when a message is checked.
Forwarding a protected message forwards its text and its reference line. The recipient can
still check that the original was genuine — the signature travels with the words.
Messages written in HTML only
What gets signed is the plain-text version of your message — the version every mail
program can show and every plugin can reproduce. Almost all mail clients send both a plain
and an HTML version together, so this is invisible to you.
If your client is configured to send only HTML, there is no such text, and a
signature over it could not be checked by anyone. Rather than sign something that would read
as "altered" to every recipient, the message is sent unprotected and counted as such in the
statistics. If you want everything protected, set your mail program to send plain text as
well as HTML.
Attachments
Attachments are carried unchanged and are not covered by the signature
today. If the content of an attachment matters, say so in the body of the message: the body
is signed, so "the invoice attached is for €4,120 to account NL00…" cannot be altered
without the reader being warned.
A message with an attachment is signed but not encrypted. Sealing replaces
the whole message with one locked block, so everything that is not the sealed text would be
dropped — the attachment included. Rather than deliver a message without the thing it was
sent for, it goes out signed and readable, and the application says why. If the content is
confidential, put it in the body, which can be sealed, rather than in a file alongside it.
More than one device
Enter the same recovery phrase on each device and they share one identity: the same key,
the same verified address, and messages encrypted to you can be opened on any of them. There
is no syncing and no account — the phrase is the whole link.
Mailing lists and newsletters
Lists usually rewrite messages as they pass through, which changes the text, which breaks
the fingerprint. A message that went through a mailing list will normally read as altered.
That is the check working correctly on a message that genuinely was altered — but it means
signing is not much use for list traffic.
Next: your recovery phrase.
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