Tao Effect Forums

With OS X 10.7.4, is it possible to encrypt Mail.app attachments only? Would the performance penalty be less than if I encrypted the entire Mail folder? Also, would there be a performance penalty with regard to backups via CrashPlan?

Thank you,

David

Hello David, you can encrypt any folder you want, just make sure it is unlocked before you launch Mail. The best is to have Espioange open on login and set the folder to auto unlock.
Crash plan will backup the disk image which is in Library/Application Support/com.taoeffect.espionage3/Data and this will do, just make sure this folder is saved.
Regarding performance, I do not expect any problems, but it all depends on speed of the mac, disk and size of the folder/number of emails, so you have to test.

Rgds
Zsolt

Thank you for your reply--I appreciate your help.

If the folder is set to auto unlock (by which I assume you mean, unlock on login?), though, won't it be available to anyone who steals the computer and changes the login password?

Also, when you say to make sure the folder is saved, could you explain a little more?

David

To change your login password he needs to know your current login password.

Put yourself in the role of a thief, how would you do it? You cannot login into your mac if you do not know the user password....

This is now a bit off topic, but nevertheless, feel free to ask if it is still unclear.

Rgds
Zsolt

Hello David, the article you pastes was I needed to understand what you are referring to, now it is clear.

In one of my replies I told you "But it surely does give one chance more to somehow hack the things and access the data."
If the autounlock is not set then one must know the Espionage password to access your data, if the autounlock is set then one must know your login password.
Considering there is no way you can reset or access the Espionage password, in comparison to resetting the login password which is possible, although not so easy to do, it is clearly more secure to have it set not to autounlock then to auto unlock.

But again, to reset the login password you need to know the administrator password, or you have to be able to boot the mac from installation CD. And this all if you did not set the firmware password, which will then prevent booting from the installation dvd, unless you change the ram module, which will reset that setting too. But considering on some macs the ram module is soldered on motherboard, it is again a question if this is possible.....

So in the first paragraph I answer your question, in the second we are discussing if and how it is possible to reset the user password, this is why I mentioned that it is off topic.

Rgds
Zsolt