It is illegal to send an email containing personally identifiable information regarding students, but what options do we have. Our IT Specialist, Spencer Heywood has put an article together explaining how to enable encryption on our Apple Mail application on our computers.
You can link to the full article here: https://www.the-empire.systems/cybersecurity/easily-encrypt-e-mail-using-gpgmail-os-x
To give you a summary of how to setup encrypted email on your Mac:
1. Go to https://gpgtools.org/ and press the “Download GPG Suite” button.
2. Once it is finished downloading, open the downloaded file. Follow the installer’s instructions to install GPG Suite.
3. Once GPG Suite is installed it should open an application on your computer called “GPG Keychain”. If it doesn’t, find the app and open it yourself. You will then be prompted to generate your own key. Please do. Name it something you will remember. I would recommend setting up a password for your keys as shown in this image: https://i0.wp.com/www.the-empire.systems/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/gpg-keys.png?w=1360&ssl=1 (194 kB)
Please make sure that if you set a passphrase, that you remember it. If you lose this passphrase you will lose the ability to view any email that you actually encrypt.
4. After generating your own key, right click on your newly created key and select “Send Public Key to Key Server”. This will allow others to find your public key which enables them to send an encrypted email to you.
5. Once you have uploaded your key to the key server, select Lookup Key in the GPG KeyChain application. Lookup everyone who was their keys uploaded to a key server. You can do this by searching “@mydomain.com” ( replacing 'mydomain.com' with any domain name, without quotes).
6. Once this is done, close the GPG Keychain Application. Open the Mail app on your Mac. When you go to craft an email you should see a little green icon that says ‘OpenPGP’ in the top right hand corner. In the subject line you should see a little lock icon. If the lock icon is locked, that means the e-mail will be encrypted. If it is unlocked, that means it will be sent insecurely or that you don’t have the public key of the person you are sending the e-mail to.