Freiheit.com on Tuesday introduced Freenigma, new service for Web e-mail users that encrypts their communications to help assure privacy. A beta release is planned for the beginning of August, and it will be available worldwide. Users interested in Freenigma can sign up today.
Freenigma works with Google Mail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail/MSN. Platform-independent, the technology requires Firefox running on Mac OS X, GNU/Linux or Windows XP, and the developers plan to release an open application programming interface to enable Freenigma to be supported by other applications. Freenigma uses Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX) technology.
Freenigma works by encrypting e-mails before they’re saved and sent. They’re then decrypted on the other end by the recipient — all mail is encrypted or decrypted by the webmail client, so it doesn’t pass through any additional servers. Users must have Freenigma installed at both ends in order for the e-mail to be encrypted and decrypted, however. Freiheit.com has noted plans to make public Freenigma keys available from the Freenigma server.
Freenigma is based on the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) — a free software replacement for Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) cryptographic software. Freenigma also supports OpenPGP, the open standard version of PGP.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details.