This interesting book covers the history and basics of email encryption. It includes three appendices and a two-page list of references. I found it to be well designed and interesting to read (if a little dry), covering a lot of material on encryption.

It starts with an introduction that explains what secure email is. The short chapters that follow cover a brief history of secure email, how secure email works, using secure email, living with secure email, and a conclusion. It provides a description of public- and private-key encryption, key generation, and a brief discussion of various historical systems of securing messages, including privacy enhanced mail, pretty good privacy, multipurpose Internet mail extensions (MIME), public-key infrastructure (PKI), public-key cryptographic standards (PKCS), cryptographic message syntax (CMS), and secure MIME (S/MIME). The book also covers authentication and certificates, with examples of how these work. It gives directions on how to start the process of encrypting personal email using various email clients including Outlook, Thunderbird, Evolution, Apple Mobile Devices, and Android. The author gives specific instructions on how to create a key and certificate through a certificate authority or how to do it yourself by using OpenSSL to create your own certificate authority and keys. The last chapter before the conclusion covers the problem of managing keys and certificates.

As stated earlier, the book is interesting but a little dry. There are a number of grammatical errors throughout the text, but these do not detract from the material. It is not a textbook, but would be a good primer for someone who wants to start using encrypted email. It does require some knowledge of computer operations and math in order to grasp the encryption and data transmission methodology.