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My local city government uses "McAffe Email Encryption". It's not a simple click-to-verify or a greylist or a CAPTCHA. After sending an email requiring a simple response I get an email to sign up for this service. I sign up to actually read the response. There appears to be an option to get this to send email directly, but it then sends another email with a form for a download.
This is an incredibly frustrating process. Is there a workaround or quick way to get this platform to just send me a damn email?
Freiheit
Posted 2011-10-27T02:20:27.263
Reputation: 527
1Yeah. use webmail. – Sathyajith Bhat – 2011-10-27T04:56:28.557
@Sathya I wish it was that simple. I used my Gmail account to send an email to my council representative. To read his reply I had to go through this process with the McAfee tool. Its something the other party uses, not something I use. – Freiheit – 2011-10-27T14:03:31.977
If it's something that the other party uses then it's not possible to bypass this. – Sathyajith Bhat – 2011-10-27T14:04:55.090
I don't know anyone who's this obnoxious about encrypting mail, and I have no experience with McAffe's system, but in order to receive an encrypted email, you yourself need to do some setup. Specifically, you need a pair of cryptographic “keys”, and the sender of the message somehow needs to get a copy of your public key. It's completely free, and there shouldn't necessarily be any “service”s involved. This McAffe thing sounds to me like it's trying to do something weird and different, which might be less secure than normal mail encryption and|or require you to pay for its “service”s. – Blacklight Shining – 2012-12-31T13:34:53.713
The short answer? No, it doesn't look like there's a workaround, or any way to get them to just send you a damn (unencrypted) email if they're being this stubborn about it. Since it's a government thing, and if there's no real reason for the message to be guaranteed not to be read by any given third party, I would complain to someone about the system they're using being too hard to use, and get them to just stop trying to make you use mail encryption. Maybe try finding others who have tried to contact them via email and have been frustrated by this. It shouldn't be too hard! – Blacklight Shining – 2012-12-31T13:37:55.230
[I know this post is a year old, but the Stack Exchange spirit seems to support bringing up old things if you feel you can contribute. Since it's so old, this specific case may not be relevant anymore, but if you do still happen to have the old email they sent you, posting a screenshot may be helpful. If you don't have anything related to this case anymore, your question (which I think could be useful to others) might get closed. :( ] – Blacklight Shining – 2012-12-31T13:42:28.127