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I have encrypted my laptop and phone, which includes emails. My concern is when I send someone an email, will they receive it encrypted or will they get it decrypted?

I guess I'm asking: what exactly is encrypted?

user
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Pablo
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    You're probably gonna send it unencrypted (with regards to your email provider at least) and your local copy is being stored encrypted. – SEJPM Jan 26 '17 at 12:24

1 Answers1

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When you encrypt your laptop and phone, that usually means that the data storage (hard drive, etc.) is encrypted. You decrypt the storage in order to work with the data (access programs, work with data, etc.).

Therefore, when you send an email, the email is not encrypted at all. So your recipient is not seeing anything encrypted because you, yourself, are not working with the email encrypted. When you close or shutdown the device, then the data (the sent email) is encrypted on that device along with everything else.

Encrypting a device is intended to protect against someone stealing your device and simply accessing the storage directly and reading everything. In order to read the data on your device, they need the password that decrypts it.

schroeder
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