Secure Email to Fax with Thunderbird

One of the frequent questions we get here at FAXAGE is how to securely send faxes via email. Email Faxing is very convenient, however email on its own is generally not a secure transport medium.

This tip covers how to set up payload encryption (encrypting the attached files to be faxed) when using Thunderbird. Thunderbird is a free email program from the makers of the Firefox web browser and is available for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux/UNIX systems.

Introducing Enigmail for Thunderbird

Enigmail is a free plug-in for Thunderbird that allows for easy-to-use PGP integration. To get it:

Download Thunderbird - Thunderbird Download Link
Download the Enigmail plug-in - Enigmail Download Link
Get Thunderbird and Enigmail configured and working. The following installation guides should help:
Thunderbird Support
Enigmail Quick Start Guide

Configuring Enigmail for FAXAGE

Once you have Thunderbird and Enigmail working, configuring Enigmail to work with the FAXAGE PGP support is relatively easy.

First, download the FAXAGE public PGP key, available in your FAXAGE account under 'Admin' -> 'Company Settings' -> 'PGP Keys' or at this link and add it to Enigmail. Enigmail also has the option to retrieve the key from public key servers. The FAXAGE key is under pgp@faxage.com and can be retrieved using the Engimail directions - here

Second, configure Enigmail to use the 'ASCII Armor' type of attachment - which is what FAXAGE supports - by adding the following two lines to your prefs.js file:
user_pref("extensions.enigmail.inlineAttachAsciiArmor",true);
user_pref("extensions.enigmail.inlineAttachExt",".asc");

The location of the prefs.js is operating-system dependent. A summary can be found here: Profile Folder Location
More information regarding setting preferences for Enigmail can be found here: Enigmail User Preferences

To Summarize

FAXAGE offers industry-leading Secure Faxing options, including PGP, Email Server-to-Server TLS/SSL transport encryption and password-protected incoming fax PDF files. We hope this information is useful as far as one option for leveraging PGP to securely send and receive faxes by email using FAXAGE.

Happy Faxing!