If you’re just curious, MTA-STS relates to SMTP, in the same way that HSTS relates to HTTP. Except, naturally, it relies on, you get three guesses… yes, DNS. And this is what it is, and how to set it up.
Continue readingSo here’s the thing about SSH: The first time you connect to a server, you have no real idea of if that’s legitimate or not, right? Well, you could compare the key fingerprint to the fingerprint that the server admin gave you and make sure they match, but nobody does that.
Well… there is a way. Using everyone’s favorite always-broken service, DNS.
Continue readingSo this is a fun one, and likely a long one. Come, let’s talk about the unlikely backing for a decentralized, privacy-focused communications platform, the very weird ways in which IMAP can be used, and a hopefully final wrap-up to my streak of rambling about PGP.
Continue readingOkay, final thing on PGP after talking about PGP itself and Signature and trust levels, we have… How you can get someone else’s public key.
There’s a few common ways to do this:
CERT recordTXT recordOPENPGPKEY recordLet’s discuss how they all work.
Continue readingSo last time we introduced the basics of how PGP works. This time, we cover something slightly more in-depth: signature types, and trust levels.
Continue readingPretty Good Privacy, or as it’s more commonly known as by its most popular client’s name, GNU Privacy Guard, is a method of encrypting and/or signing your messages using the power of public key cryptography. And, while it can get extremely complex, the basics of using PGP are, actually, pretty simple. So in the words of the great Angus Deveson, Let’s get started.
Continue readingFor those of you that have ever tried to setup email on your phone that’s more than just GMail, you’ve likely been asked how you want to access the account, either POP or IMAP, and were likely told the difference is that “IMAP keeps messages on the server.” Well, let’s go over the specific differences here, to actually give a more complete understanding of what each protocol is like.
Continue readingSMTP, or, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, is the communications protocol that email servers (Mail Transfer Agents, or MTAs) use to talk to one another to… transfer mail. And SMTP has one glaring issue: A rather ambiguous “try again later”.
Continue readingAbstract: You suck, and do not know not to manage many of the security aspects of email.
Continue readingYou all know how footnotes work here, right? A little superscript number at the end of a sentence, and a list of numbers at the very bottom of the article, usually little remarks or extra details that are useful but not worth interrupting the flow of the article as a whole (or references). There’s just one problem: the notes aren’t anywhere near their associated text, meaning if you do want to read them, you might need to do some bouncing back-and-forth to understand everything. Well, no more!
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