It has been a while since we’ve written anything here. Honestly, we have seen so much security news recently that we suspect people didn’t want to see any more.
By now, most people know about Sony being hacked along with countless other organizations. Gmail was hacked, Hotmail was hacked, Hotmail even went offline for a while, leaving users wondering what was happening to their email.
With all of this news about security violations, what are people to think? Well, the first thing people should think about is their own security, or rather the security of their data.
We generally don’t like to drone on and on but… do you leave your messages on Microsoft’s servers? How about on Google’s servers? Yahoo’s? Anyone else’s server? If you do, then you must consider that your privacy is in their hands. If a system administrator at Yahoo makes a mistake and leaves a hole open for a hacker to exploit, it will hurt you. Someone you don’t know, and never interact with, can cause you great discomfort by (accidentally) exposing all of the email stored in your online account. Considering most websites allow you to have your passwords emailed to you, this completely exposes your online identity to theft. Gmail users in China learned this lesson the hard way.
Responsible Behavior
What should you do? As we’ve said repeatedly (again, forgive us for droning on, again), you should NOT use IMAP to access your email (it leaves messages on the server, waiting for someone to hack your account). We regularly receive requests to support IMAP within TrulyMail because it can be used properly by some users. For us, this argument is the same as saying that TrulyMail should allow scripts inside the body of messages because they could be used for a good purpose, not just for hacking.
We have taken a strong stance against the weaknesses in email. Email is more than 40 years old and is full of weaknesses. At the same time, we all depend on email and likely use our email client more than any other piece of software. So, the fact that there are serious dangers in it should ring alarm bells. We answered the alarm by releasing an email client which solves many of the problems with email itself.
If someone sends you an email with a script embedded in it, could there be a good reason? It is possible but it is much more likely that they are trying to compromise your computer. After all, a script is another word for a program. Running an unknown program on your computer is simply asking for problems.
OK, enough about the dangers out in the world. What other news do we have for you?
Since our last writing, four months ago, we have added many, many new features to TrulyMail. We’ve even added a new version of TrulyMail.
Introducing TrulyMail Lite
At the request of our customers, we have created TrulyMail Lite. It is just like TrulyMail except it has fewer features. It does not support email (you can only communicate with other TrulyMail recipients). It does not support voice messaging or many other features found in TrulyMail. Why would anyone use TrulyMail Lite when TrulyMail is so much more feature-rich (both TrulyMail and TrulyMail Lite are free)? The simple answer is that TrulyMail Lite is for older computers and is a lighter-weight application, an application which does not consume so many resources, but will still allow you the safety of encrypted communications. Of course, TrulyMail Lite is available in Standard and Portable editions.
New Features
We’ve also added to TrulyMail’s already long list of features. For example, you can now play a sound as part of a messaging processing rule. For example, if you want to play one sound when you receive a message from John Smith and a different sound when you receive a message from Suzi Jones, you can now do that easily.
TrulyMail is now an RSS reader so if you want to download your news or blog updates directly into TrulyMail, you can easily do so.
TrulyMail now supports AutoText (or signatures). That is, if you want to be able to quickly add text to your messages, even using hot-keys, you can do so easily now.
You can now relate contacts to your outbound email accounts. So, if you want to make sure that every time you send to John Smith, it comes from your Hotmail account and every time you send to Suzi Jones, it comes from your Gmail account, you can do that easily now. TrulyMail will even warn you if you have two contacts on the same message who are assigned to different email accounts.
TrulyMail can now import messages from Outlook Express, Incredimail, and any email client which uses .eml file formats.
You can also now change the color of your folders in your folder tree.
One more major change we have made is that Encrypted Web Messaging now supports attachments. As you may know, Encrypted Web Messaging is a way to send encrypted messages to recipients who do not use TrulyMail. All encryption is done on your computer and all decryption is done in the recipient’s browser so everything is nice and secure. However, one problem has been handing attachments. After all, if decryption happens in the recipient’s browser, then they cannot decrypt attachments, right?
There are, of course, solutions to almost every problem. The solution in this case is to use AES256-encrypted zip files as attachments. The user will be able to open (and decrypt) the attachment with any zip utility which supports AES256-encrypted zip files. Most zip utilities (7-zip, WinZip, etc.) do but Windows’ built in support for zip files does not (nor does Mac's).
If your recipient does not have a third-party zip utility, what can they do? That’s easy. They can download a self-extracting zip file as an .exe file. In this case, they just download and run the file they download. The self-extracting zip file is actually a program (simply an extractor) so as long as they have Windows XP or later, they do not need a zip utility. The best part is that the choice belongs to the recipient. They can choose whichever they want.
If you want to learn more about the features within TrulyMail, the best way is to watch some videos: http://trulymail.com/Videos
As you can see, we have added quite a few new things to TrulyMail – most in direct response to feedback from our customers.
As always, we would love to hear from you as well.
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