Password Protecting Mail.app and your e-mails

Monday, September 6th, 2010

One of the issues I had with using the Mail.app on OSX is its lack of security.

If some one is logged in as you they then get access to everything else on you machine like say your mail client.

Now I really like the Mail client. I have no intention of switching clients. So a solution was required.

After a little digging i found there was no mods for Mail. No hacks or any other means in which to password protect the client and the mail. Eventual I realised I was doing it all wrong its not the emails and the client that can be protected but where they are being stored is what can be protected.

I finally realised if I created a encrypted dmg and ran everything from there it would yield the same results.

Aim:
Get both the Mail.app and my email onto a password protected drive.

Process:

  1. Open Disk Utility to create the encrypted DMG /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app
  2. Click “New Image” on the top
  3. Select a Name and a save as location
  4. Further down under size select the size I made mine 10GB  this depends on how much mail you expect to store locally
  5. Below that make sure select the Encryption
  6. Hit create set the password and now you should have a mounted encrypted drive
  7. Move your Mail app  from /Applications/ to the root of your mounted encrypted drive cut it don’t copy it
  8. Then make make an alias of the Mail app in the in the /Applications/ folder(ctrl dragging the icon)
  9. Now you need to cut and past your emails to the encrypted drive find the folder /Users/YOUR_USERNAME/Library/Mail and past it in the encrypted drive
  10. Now make an alias of the mail folder from you encrypted drive  back to the /Users/abraham.azam/Library/ (ctrl dragging the folder)
  11. Finished.

If you click the mail icon on the Dock it should now access your mail client and your amils from a scure and ecrypted location. if you unmount the drive and click the icon it will promt you for the password to the dmg then opens the mail app.

please let em know what you think of these steps 🙂

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