Totemo TrustMail® PushedPDF
Today’s four most common ways to encrypt e-mail messages are S/MIME, PGP, encrypted containers like password-protected ZIP attachments and finally WebMail applications accessed over an SSL/TLS connection. Considered standards, S/MIME and PGP allow communicating with the most external partners and are widely used. Both technologies require the use of key pairs (the so-called asymmetric encryption).
Even though S/MIME is already supported by all usual e-mail clients natively, its use without additional supporting tools or adequate know how (to manage the certificates, store them in the address book, etc.) is not always trivial.
The use of encrypted containers or ZIP attachments necessitates the installation of dedicated software components or plug-ins for every communication partner, even on the recipient side. Most certainly, many recipients will not have installed the chosen software. Moreover, if they do not have sufficient administrative rights on their system, they will not be able to install new software components.
For a company, WebMail applications accessed over connections secured through SSL/TLS are easy to implement. Their use for external recipients is very straightforward even though confidential messages transmitted through a WebMail system can only be read while the recipient is online. Totemo TrustMail® comes with an own integrated WebMail application that provides additional features like allowing the external recipient to download a local copy of the secure message on his computer, thus also accessing the secure content offline. The available download formats are HTML, EML and PDF.
Totemo now offers the e-mail to PDF conversion not only to previously registered WebMail users, but also to new communication partners. The PDF format becomes one more security option for new external users. The whole e-mail, attachments included, is converted into a PDF document that is encrypted using a configurable symmetric algorithm. The PDF is sent as an attachment to a normal e-mail message. The only requirement on the recipient side is a normal, free PDF reader, for example Adobe’s Acrobat Reader. Since the PDF format has become a de-facto standard for the sending of documents over the Internet, many PDF readers are available for the broadest possible platform choice (Linux, UNIX, MAC, Windows, Windows Mobile, Symbian, BlackBerry, etc.) for free.