PHP: Sending "secure" or encrypted emails

[Steve Jenkins]

Hi,

Wonder if anyone can help. I have a client who would like to have a
form-to-mail on their website, but, are concerned about the security
of emails sent by such a form.

In the passed I have worked on a Microsoft ASP-type site which was
able to send encrypted emails which could only be opened in a specific
machines Outlook which had been setup with a particular certificate.

It used the following component: http://www.aspencrypt.com/.
"AspEncrypt is an Active Server component that brings security to your
application through encryption. With AspEncrypt, you can encrypt data,
send S/MIME-based secure mail, compute one-way hash values, generate
and verify digital signatures, issue and manage X.509 digital
certificates, and more."

Is there anyway of doing something similar in PHP? It doesn't have to
be encrypted the same way, but is there anything one can do with
form-to-mails that make them more secure?

Thanks, Steve.

[Mike Peters]

On 2004-03-05, Steve Jenkins wrote:

Hi,

Wonder if anyone can help. I have a client who would like to have a
form-to-mail on their website, but, are concerned about the security
of emails sent by such a form.

In the passed I have worked on a Microsoft ASP-type site which was
able to send encrypted emails which could only be opened in a specific
machines Outlook which had been setup with a particular certificate.

It used the following component: http://www.aspencrypt.com/.
"AspEncrypt is an Active Server component that brings security to your
application through encryption. With AspEncrypt, you can encrypt data,
send S/MIME-based secure mail, compute one-way hash values, generate
and verify digital signatures, issue and manage X.509 digital
certificates, and more."

Is there anyway of doing something similar in PHP? It doesn't have to
be encrypted the same way, but is there anything one can do with
form-to-mails that make them more secure?

Thanks, Steve.

PHP's OpenSSL functions can provide all of the above. Check out:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.openssl.php

I'm not sure of any existing, ready made solutions but I'm sure they
exist and if not, given the above set of functions, it's fairly straight
forward to produce what you need.

--
Mike Peters
mike [-AT-] ice2o [-DOT-] com
http://www.ice2o.com