CryptoMail Newsletter

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

CryptoMail Service with PGP

At the end of 2005, CryptoMail.org will begin to roll out the primary service upgrade for its free secure email service. CryptoMail will employ Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) which many people consider to be the next milestone in the history of CryptoMail.org.

The primary service upgrade will occur in two phases: 1) Create new public and private keys (PGP keys), and at a later date, 2) migrate all of our accounts to our new system that runs CryptoMail Email System (CMES) 1.00, so our users can enjoy the benefit of a widely adapted encryption technology, PGP. In addition to the change in technology, the new system will also contain many major enhancements, such as sorting in email viewing from the CMES 1.00, and you can expect to have the familiar user interface, functionality and quality with our current service.

The precise date of the migration has not been set as this newsletter is written, but people in the CryptoMail.org organization are scheduling a date to migrate our accounts to have a minimum impact and inconvenience for you. When the date is set, we will post and announce on our homepage and bulletin boards, and you will receive emails from our system administrator about the event prior to the migration.

Documentation

In the coming months, we should have a few documentation posts and updates in the HOWTO and FAQs sections.

Thanks for the contributions from Ivan Liew! Because of him, we will have the first HOWTO document about "Installing Linux Mandrake 10.1 and CryptoMail-1.0.0A.". We are also updating our FAQ documents, especially those documents that address questions about our service. The new FAQs will try to resolve common confusions in definitions.

New documents will be announced in the next CryptoMail Newsletter.

Interrupted Website and Service

Our CryptoMail.org website and CryptoMail Service were interrupted by a catastrophic hardware failure between May 6 and 8. During that period, our users were unable to visit our website and access their secure email accounts.

Our IT staff located the problem, replaced all the necessary hardware, and restored all users’ files back to our server immediately. Officially, we reopened our website and service in the morning of May 10. Unfortunately, during the period, from May 6 to 8, all the incoming emails for all users that were not received by our server would have been bounced back to their senders. Some users were able to receive those emails after few days, if the senders’ email service providers had their system setup to resend email upon failure.

Due to the nature of our backup schedule, we lost about one day’s worth of our users’ data (your email messages inside your accounts). Though we restored all users’ data, the latest backup of the users’ data were a day prior to the hardware failure. Therefore, users should have expected to have lost their email messages saved on May 6, while all of your messages before May 6 are unchanged and remained in your account.

The hardware incident is the first major interruption since CryptoMail.org has opened it’s free service in the past five years. People in the organization are trying really hard to get the resources to have a reliable infrastructure to host our free service. In the future, we are considering purchasing redundant equipment.

People from CryptoMail.org sincerely apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused you and thank you for your patience during the unforeseen catastrophic hardware failure incident.

Corrections

In the Volume 1, Issue 12, the newsletter has a typo in the "Sign Up Problem, Firewall Issue" section. In the fifth paragraph of the section, "If you use our service ...you might want to disable our firewall ...", and the sentence should be that, "If you use our service ...you might want to disable your firewall ..."