Secure Mail between Companies

[spi200]

Hi Guys

Our company would like to send "Secure" mail to another company. Assuming both companies run Notes R5 or latter, is it possible and what is involved?. Does a cross certification need to take place to enable the sending of encrypted mail?.
Thanks for your help.

David

 

[pmonett]

If I am not mistaken, cross certification has nothing to do with secure mail.
Secure mail is encrypted mail, and Notes uses RSA for encryption, which means that each recipient has a public key that must be used to encrypt the file.
What I think you need to do is get both system admins together and have each other create Person documents containing the public keys (which are easily available).
If all goes well, users on each side will be able to find the recipients without problem, and the mail will be secured correctly.
The drawback in this scheme means that each company will need to maintain a list of people from the other company. There might be ways to restrict this exchange to just a select number of people.

Another way of doing this would be to jointly implement a specific mail db, dedicated to inter-company mail between the two.
This app would have the user create a document just like a mail, but that doc would then be encrypted before being sent by a common key shared between the two companies.
Upon arriving on the other side, the mail would be decrypted and routed to the required recipient.

An easier version of the idea would be to just create a key and send it to everyone involved. The drawback in all this is that users must remember to encrypt their message before it is sent.

Pascal.