Why can I no longer send/reply to email on my Galaxy S5?

[semprini2]

Can no longer send/reply to email on Galaxy S5.

As of today, when I try to send/answer an email, I get the following Error message: "Unable to send email. The recipient's public key is not available for encryption." I've tried turning wi-fi off, with no effect. Have also tried adjusting some other settings. This cropped up when I decided to connect to my wi-fi network to save data usage. I just unchecked "Encrypt emails" and that worked. However, what does that do to security? I always had "Encrypt" checked before. How to get around this?

 

[Rukbat]

Re: Can no longer send/reply to email on Galaxy S5.

"Encrypt emails" means "look up the recipient's public key on whatever keychains the app uses, encode the email and send it". The recipient uses his/her private key to decrypt it. I doubt that more than 1 0r 2 percent of emails are ever sent encrypted, because the method of handling the public keys is at about the same stage as Luna City is right now.

If you want to start exchanging encrypted emails with people, get PGP (or some other similar public/private key encryption system) and use your public key as your signature. People who are aware of the whole concept (probably about as many as are aware of how a synchrotron actually works, outside of the security community) will use that key to encrypt future emails to you. Your email program just uses your private key (which you never give to anyone) and you read the email.

This is done so that people other than the recipient who get your email (hackers, the NSA, etc.) can't read them. Again - the people who can get your email other than the person you send it to (not counting the NSA, etc.) are probably all at every Black Hat conference every year.

Almost no one encrypts emails, although some of us appreciate that some email app developers have included the means of doing so.

 

[semprini2]

Re: Can no longer send/reply to email on Galaxy S5.

Thanks for the info. However, before I switched to wi-fi, I had the "Encrypt" field checked and never had a problem. What is it about wi-fi that changes all that?

 

[Rukbat]

Re: Can no longer send/reply to email on Galaxy S5.

Probably something in the email app. You can't send an encrypted email to someone the app can't find a public key for, whether you use mobile data or wifi or magic.