CryptoMail Newsletter

CryptoMail.org publishes the CryptoMail News-letter to provide information about secure web based email communication.

Toorcon

After a short break from our technical conferences in the summer, Peter and Joshua were on the road again to another conference, Toorcon.  Though we had fewer audience members, they were the most enthusiastic users that we have encountered.  The conference provided the opportunity for us to gain a closer relationship with our most loyal supporters.

Surprisingly, by far, Toorcon is the most pleasurable conference that we have attended.  Not only hosted in the most beautiful city in the country, the conference was handled by the most friendly, energetic and knowledgeable staffs.  The city is breathtaking, the staffs are brilliant, and the speakers are distinguishable.  In here, we would like to give our thanks to H1KarI for inviting us.

Sign Up Problem, Firewall Issue

Some people might encounter a problem with our CryptoMail Service, if they have certain firewall software installed in their computer.

When you have a firewall software enabled, for example, Norton Internet Security or Sygate Personal Firewall, you get a error message that reads "Fatal Errors Detected: Did your session go away?"  The error message occurs, after the CryptoMail Client Applet loads successfully, you have moved your mouse pointer over the applet to generate a private key and are trying to set your passphase.

The error message is caused by a failure in a secure session initialization.  The initialization requires your browser to pass your session token and CBC Blowfish encrypted session cloak using the http header.  Thus, your firewall software blocks the http header that is used to communicate data between your browser and our web service application, the CryptoMail Server.  You can get more technical information regarding how our server communicates with your web browser from our SeXMAP Specification at "http://www.cryptomail.org/documentation/protocol_specifications/sexmap.html."

The problem is that your firewall or Internet security software implements a relatively simple stealth security strategy by removing all information in the http header, though a stealth function should only hide the description of your computer from a web site.

If you use our service, and you encounter the problem, you might want to disable your firewall software, then try to sign up again.  Another solution is to configure your firewall not to block the http header, while you are accessing our service.

As this time, people who use Norton Internet Security and Sygate Personal Firewall have encountered the problem.  In the future, we are unlikely to provide a work-around solution for the problem, because using the http header to pass data is a commonly used industry practice to gain significant technical advantages.

New and Updated Forum

In the next month, we are going to change and update our Forum section in CryptoMail.org to provide a media rich based communication hub for our users.

We designed our new Forum around the type of channels, online News, printable Newsletters, electronic bulletin boards, real-time Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and private mailing addresses.

The key enchantment in our new Forum is a full feature electronic bulletin board where you get technical support, discussions of our service, development and documentation.  We also include an after hours discussion group for anyone who wants to share their opinions in secure web based email, computer security, privacy and communication in a free, unrestricted and uncensored environment.

For people who want to immediately respond from other users or us, the cryptomail channel at the OFTC (irc.oftc.net) IRC server welcomes all discussion in secure, open source and free software.

In short, we limited our mailing lists to cut down our resources in replying and forwarding users’ questions.  Depending on the topic of which you want to talk to us or other users, the new Forum will provide the channels that you can use.