Reading encrypted message from stranger

10.07.2020

•4 min read

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A few days ago, I've received an e-mail from a stranger with an encrypted message. An e-mail from a stranger is nothing new nowadays, although an encrypted one is at least something worth taking a look at. For the first time, I could experience in real life that someone knows how to use encryption, and sends a message to me. From my experience, it's rare to see it if someone sends you an encrypted message, therefore I was motivated to read what this person has to say. After searching for some help on how to safely process reading this message further, unfortunately, the ocean of tools and not precise tutorials only get me even more confused, so I thought after figuring all things out, I will summarize this process here.

Sidenote: I noticed that this message has been sent to me ~1y after I published my GPG key on the public servers. I did not publish my GPG key anywhere except my blog and GPG public servers, so I think someone is probably watching for newly published keys in public servers and that's how I have been found.

Although, if it does not scare you, and you find this interested in how I did it anyway, you can read more about it in The lesson of verifying Git commits. 😉

Message decryption

Let's say you received an encrypted message and now the question is, how to read this message? It depends on the format you have received it. You can receive the whole e-mail encrypted, or an e-mail with an encrypted message, as I did below. Nevertheless, generally, you should get something that looks like this: