Open and distributed systems to provide secure email service

摘要

A system to ease secure email communication by providing a unique email address of a user's choice, along with a private and public key pair which are generated and then associated with the email address. Along with the key pair, an plug-in to her preferred mail client is delivered to the user. The plug-in will allow for automatic retrieval of recipient's public keys from a server and encryption of mails to recipients whose email address is associated with a public key. Also, the email plug-in will perform automatic decryption of incoming mail, if necessary, plus additional functionality based on the existence of public and private keys.