How to Encrypt your Gmail Messages with Google Docs???

Lately there has been a lot of chatter about email tracking and how government agencies are snooping on email conversations. If you are looking for ways to keep your email private and would not like anyone else to read your confidential Gmail messages (except for the recipient), you should consider encrypting your email before hitting the send button.

There are a couple of browser extensions that help you encrypt Gmail but here we discuss a new and more simple Google Docs based encryption method that
works across all browsers and requires no add-ons or apps. You secure your message with a strong password and the recipient will have to enter the same password in order to decrypt your message.

For the technically oriented, our Google Docs based solution encrypts (and decrypts) your email messages using the industry-standard AES algorithm which is implemented in Google Apps Script using SJCL, a JavaScript library for cryptography developed at Stanford.

How to Encrypt Gmail Messages

Sender’s Computer – Encrypt the message before sending

1. Open Gmail and compose a new email message. Put the recipient’s email address in the “To” field, add a subject (this won’t be encrypted) and put your message in the email body. DO NOT hit the send button, let the message stay in your Gmail drafts folder.
2. Click here to make a copy of the “Encrypt Gmail” sheet in your Google Drive. Choose Gmail->Initialize and allow the sheet to access your Gmail account.
3. Pick your Gmail draft from the drop-down, enter a password and hit “Send Mail.”

The Google Sheet will now encrypt your email message using AES and it gets delivered to the recipient via your Gmail account. Let’s now switch to the recipient’s machine and see how they can decrypt the message.

Recipient’s Computer – Decrypt the encrypted Gmail Message

1. Open the encrypted Gmail message that just landed in your mailbox, select the body of the email and copy it to your clipboard.
2. Go to Decrypt Gmail, enter the secret password (that the sender shared with you over a phone call) and paste the encrypted email message. Hit the “Decrypt” button to see the original message.

Encrypting email with Google Docs is easy and the other advantage is that recipients can decrypt the encrypted message using any browser without requiring apps or browser add-ons.

One more thing. When you write a draft message inside Gmail, it is automatically stored on Google’s servers. If you would like to keep Google out of the loop, you can write the message outside Gmail (say inside Notepad) and encrypt it offline before sending the message via Gmail.

You can also use these encrypt and decrypt tools to send confidential messages on other channels like Facebook, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, etc. These tools encrypt & decrypt text inside your browser and none of your data ever leaves the local computer. ↓

Content Totally Copied from labnol.org
Thanks to Mr. Amit Agarwal

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How to verify a email address?

          How do you verify if a given email address is real or fake? The obvious solution is that you send a test mail to that email address and if your message doesn’t bounce, it is safe to assume* that the address is real.
[*] Some web domains may have configured a catch-all email address meaning that messages addressed to a non-existent mailbox will not be returned to the sender but in most cases, such email messages will bounce.

Ping an Email Address to Validate it!

When you send an email to someone, the message goes to an SMTP server which then looks for the MX (Mail Exchange) records of the email recipient’s domain.
For instance, when you send an email to hello@gmail.com, the mail server will try to find the MX records for the gmail.com domain. If the records exist, the next step would be to determine whether that email username (hello in our example) is present or not.
Using a similar logic, we can verify an email address from the computer without actually sending a test message. Here’s how:
Let say that we want to verify if the address billgates@gmail.com exists or not?

Step 1. Enable telnet in Windows.   Or if you already have the PuTTY utility, skip this step.

Step 2. Open the command prompt and type the following command:

nslookup  – type=mx gmail.com

This command will extract and list the MX records of a domain as shown below. Replace gmail.com with the domain of the email address that you are trying to verify.

gmail.com MX preference=30, exchanger = alt3.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com
gmail.com MX preference=20, exchanger = alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com
gmail.com MX preference=5,  exchanger = gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com
gmail.com MX preference=10, exchanger = alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com
gmail.com MX preference=40, exchanger = alt4.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com

Step 3. As you may have noticed, it is not uncommon to have multiple MX records for a domain. Pick any one of the servers mentioned in the MX records, may be the one with the lowest preference level number (in our example, gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com), and “pretend” to send a test message to that server from you computer.
For that, go to command prompt window and type the following commands in the listed sequence:
3a: Connect to the mail server:

telnet gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com 25

3b: Say hello to the other server

HELO

3c: Identify yourself with some fictitious email address

mail from:<labnol@labnol.org>

3d: Type the recipient’s email address that you are trying to verify:

rcpt to:<billgates@gmail.com>

The server response for ‘rcpt to’ command will give you an idea whether an email address is valid or not. You’ll get an “OK” if the address exists else a 550 error like:

• abc@gmail.com – The email account that you tried to reach does not exist.
• support@gmail.com – The email account that you tried to reach is disabled.

Thanks to Mr. Amit Agarwal.


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How to Find the Person Behind an Email Address? || How to find the sender of a email?

                 You get an email from a person with whom you have never interacted before and therefore, before you reply to that message, you would like to know something more about him or her. How do you do this without directly asking the other person?
Web search engines are obviously the most popular place for performing reverse email lookups but if the person you’re trying to research doesn’t have a website or has never interacted with his email address on public forums before, Google will probably be of little help.
          No worries, here are few tips and online services that may still  help you uncover the identity
of that unknown email sender.
#1. Find the sender’s location

Open the header of the email message and look for lines that say “Received: from” followed by an IP address in square brackets. If there are multiple entries, use the IP address mentioned in the last entry.

          Now paste the IP address in this trace route tool and you should get a fairly good idea about the location of the email sender.

#2. Reverse email search with Facebook

Facebook has 450 million users worldwide and there’s a high probability that the sender may also have a profile on Facebook.
Unlike LinkedIn and most other social networks, Facebook lets you search users by email address so that should make your job simpler. Just paste the email address of the sender into the Facebook search box and you’ll immediately know if a matching profile exists in the network.
If you are able to locate that person on Facebook, download his profile picture and then upload it to Google Images (click the camera icon in the search box). This acts as a reverse image search engine so you can locate his other social profiles where he may have used the same picture.
#3. Check all the other Social Networks
You can use a service like Knowem to quickly determine if a profile with a particular username exists in any of the social networks.
If the email address of the send is something like green_peas@hotmail.com, there’s a probably that he or she may have created accounts of some other social network using the same alias “green_peas” – put that in knowem.com to confirm.
#4. People Search

Finally, if nothing works, you should try a people search service like Pipl and Spokeo – both services let you perform reverse email lookups but Spokeo has a more comprehensive database than Pipl.
Other than regular web documents, Spoke also scans social networks and even the whois information of domain names to find any bit of information associated with an email address. However, some of the results returned by Spokeo are only available to subscribers.


Thanks to Mr.Amit Agarwal

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