OME requires recipients to sign in to an Office 365 account or confirm their identity via a single-use password, which is sent as a code to a mobile device or an email account. Sending an encrypted email via OME is a straightforward process, though you recipients will have a bit of legwork to do to get their hands on your message.

OME can successfully send encrypted emails to recipients using email clients other than Outlook! Users with the following plans can also add Azure Information Protection Plan 1 to their subscription to receive access to the OME feature: Unfortunately, OME is only available as part of a handful of plans – and you'll need to be subscribed to one of these in order to use the encryption feature: You won't need any certificates to send encrypted messages via Office 365 Message Encryption (OME). It's a lot of legwork, and to make matters worse, S/MIME can be rendered totally ineffective if an encryption key gets lost or falls into the wrong hands.Īll in all, S/MIME is probably only going to be used effectively by folks whose workplaces already have it set up. S/MIME requires that you acquire a certificate to validate your identity and, of course, requires that your recipient have one, too. S/MIME encryption can be tricky to configure – namely because your intended recipient will need to be using an email service that supports S/MIME and have it set up and ready to rock. We'll take a brief look at each method below, then dive into some step-by-step setup guides later in the article. The recipient of your message will therefore require the private key that matches up with the public one – or else they won't be able to see what you've written!Ĭurrently, there are three ways to encrypt Outlook emails. Encryption requires the use of a set of keys – a public key (used to do the encrypting) and a private one (used for both encrypting and decrypting).

When you encrypt an email, you're turning it into undecipherable ciphertext, whereas before it was plain text that anybody could read. First thing's first, it's a good idea to get an idea of what encrypting an email actually entails.

Encrypting emails in outlook