I came across a post at BoingBoing the other day on a new free email encryption program called Freenigma. It's a free plug-in for Firefox that currently works with Gmail, Yahoo, and MSN/Hotmail. It looks pretty user friendly - once installed, it adds a "Freenigma encrypt" button to the compose screen of your email. You simply click the encrypt button to encrypt your message before you send it. The person receiving the message must also have a freenigma account in order to un-encrypt the message, because your freenigma password works as the key to the encryption. Once you sign up and install Freenigma, you can send invitations to your contacts so they can also install and use freenigma. It only works with Firefox 1.5 at the moment - but that's the best browser to be using anyway. The person receiving the encrypted messages will have to be using Firefox and Freenigma, but they can be using any of the three compatible email clients - Gmail, Yahoo, or MSN/Hotmail.

One risk with using Freenigma is that you cannot retrieve your password. In order to make it more secure, they don't store your password on their servers. Which means if you forget it, you won't be able to get it back, and you won't be able to read any of your old encrypted messages, either.

According to this interview with one of the creators of Freenigma, they are also working on making it possible to encrypt files your own disk using your Freenigma account. Of course, most of how he explains that makes no sense to me, but it certianly sounds promising.

Freenigma is still in beta, so you have to sign up to receive an invitation to register. You can do this at Freenigma.com. Once you sign up, you'll receive an email invitation, and then later you'll receive another email with a link. This link will allow you to register on the site and download Freenigma. They include details on how to do this - you'll have to tell Firefox to allow the download and then click a second time to actually download it. After installing it you'll have restart Firefox, and you'll receive a pop-up welcome message. I didn't initially see it when I then went in to my email, but I discovered that there is a small Freenigma icon in the lower right corner of my browser, and it has to be clicked once so that it shows up blue to enable Freenigma.

My technical/computer knowledge is pretty limited, but it seems that this would work well in combination with something like portable Firefox and /or Torpark, which creates a secure and encrypted connection to the internet using Firefox from a portable USB flash drive - allowing it to be used from any computer with a USB drive. This would allow anonymous web surfing and the creation of encrypted email messages from shared or public computers.

The main drawback that's been mentioned is that because Freenigma only encrypts the body of your message, someone could still see who you received or sent messages from/to, and of course, they could see that you were using encrypted messages - which is apparently banned in certian countries.

You can register to get Freenigma at freenigma.com. Alternately, you can send me a message at burmaunderground AT gmail.com and ask for an invite.