Christian Engvall

If you use Wordpress and forms, or any other plugin that sends you an email, it could be a good idea to encrypt emails that Wordpress send you. For example Google scans through your inbox looking for words they can use to show ads that is more interesting to you. Or if someone gets hold of your password and can get information on your site via your email. Encrypting the emails will make it harder to extract information from them. And if those arguments are not enough here is another one: it’s fun to work with encryption.

This tutorial expect you to have set up your own private and public keys for email encryption already, if not this will take you around 5 minutes if you follow any of these guides: Encrypt emails for mac, windows and linux.

Install plugin

As Wordpress has such a nice community that provides so many plugins already, there was already a plugin for this as well. So no need to do any coding. Meitar Moscovitz provides us with a plugin called WP PGP Encrypted Emails. So go ahead and install this plugin on your Wordpress site.

Generate PGP Signing key

After activating the plugin a notification shows up that wants you to Generate PGP Signing key. Click that button. That will create a private and public key that is used to encrypt the mail.

Adding your own public key

After you click Generate PGP signing key-button you will be taken to wp-admin/options-general.php. There you must add your own public key (the one that you generated when following the tutorials above, before installing the plugin) to the field Admin Email PGP Public Key.

Subjects are not encrypted in emails, therefore you have the option to empty them before sending by checking: Always empty subject lines for PGP-encrypted emails

At the time this post is being written this plugin does not support attachments being encrypted. You can either wait for it to happen or code it yourself since the plugin is open sourced. Also, i suggest you read a bit on Meitar Moscovitz, he sounds like a very interesting developer.