This is Part 2 on email encryption for Outlook 2003. Part 1 can be read here. This part will talk about encryption and decryption buttons in an Outlook email.
An encryption button in a new email message would beneficial in that you wouldn’t have to open up the crypto manager to send an encrypted message. When the button is pressed it will encrypt the body of the email message. It will not send the message, as that is what the send button is for. This will allow you to see the encrypted message before sending. The downside of this is that it will only use the public key from the first contact in the "To" textbox. You could put more contacts in, but because it isn’t using their public key in the encryption they will not be able to decrypt it.
[Update: Due to some issues with the command bar I’ve since removed the encryption button. To send an encrypted message you will have to use Crypto Manager. The problem I was running into was that the encryption button would work on first use, but after that it wouldn’t work and on subsequent Outlook startups created an additional duplicate command bar. I think this issue is due to Microsoft Word being used as my email editor and I probably need to create a plug-in for Word in order for this to work correctly. /]
A decryption button is a necessity so that the person receiving the encrypted email message can decrypt it and read it. This will allow the message to be stored encrypted and only decrypted when the person needs to read it. This will cause some issue if the receiver wants to search for some text in the plain text of the encrypted email message, however it will be more secure.
In the last part I talk about a problem with the installation that it doesn’t work on all computers. Well I’m pretty sure that it isn’t due to the setup program. I’m thinking that on those computers not all of the Office Updates have been applied. I’ve come to this conclusions because I’ve successfully installed it on 5 computers without any problems.
I've uploaded the setup files to the server and you can download here and the source code is here.
[Update: You can download a tutorial video here./]