14 DAY TRIAL // Sending emails can be a lot more dangerous then you think. You never know if your password leaked to some no good deed person and if your correspondence is violated on a daily basis by a malicious party. That is why you need to make your passwords as strong as possible and if you worry about remembering them, try a password manager. A tool like this not only will keep all your countersigns locked under a single key but will also provide you with the necessary means for generating a strong password.
But that is not what we are going to talk about right now. I was more interested in the methods used to securely transmit data via email. Password protected archives are one way to do it but the process is not as elegant as modern times require.
Signed, Sealed & Delivered is a $20 solution for securely moving data back and forth over the Internet. It works with AES encryption standard by creating vaults of any dimension you want, which can include any type of file you want. More than this, it comes equipped with an internal mail client to send the vaults from.
It comes with a ?10 price tag (about $20) and a trial of 30 days. There is no other limitation of the application so it can be subjected to a proper testing before buying it.
After launching the program a very user friendly interface awaits, making available all options in plain view, in both a side panel with expandable menus as well as in the toolbar. You cannot miss any of the alternatives made available in the interface even if you wanted to.
The principle guiding Signed, Sealed & Delivered is quite simple. It allows you to create vaults sealed with a pass-phrase, in which you can store any type of data and sending it to anyone via an internal mail client with basic functionality. The pass-phrase of the vault can be any countersign of up to 64 characters in length (that's a small paragraph if you come to think of it), not counting spaces between the characters.
All vaults are stored on your computer and unfortunately are not protected against deletion but you can set an expiry date for them. If you are well organized you can work with multiple vaults at once. The key is to remember the passwords for all of them. These are stored under the native SSD extension so they are not affected by any type of malware that might be crawling on your or receiver's computer.
The list of operations working with a vault include adding files or folders for secure storage, removing them, sending it via email (in this case you will have to pay a visit to Settings area to define the necessary details) and set an expiration date for the vault. If a vault reaches its expiration date it can no longer be opened and deleting it is the only alternative.
Careful with deleting the files in a vault; during our testing on both Vista and XP each time we tried to delete multiple files an unhandled exception message popped up. The application would not crash but it was not to comfy either as not all files were removed and the remove operation had to be repeated.
Settings section of the program stores general options, security settings and mail settings. Users can set it to display the sidebar (it is kind of superfluous considering that the same options are accessible from toolbar and menubar as well), configure the default action to be taken when the same file encountered (overwrite, ask before overwrite or don't overwrite) and changing a bit of the appearance of the app. Regarding the skins, I must say that it is a not too important feature as the effects are not that great and the application looks good by default.
Security tab lets you set the length of the pass-phrase protecting the vault (up to 64 characters not including spaces) and provides the means for selective access to settings area of the program by securing it with a password.
For completing protection settings you can enable the resident antivirus on your computer to scan the files as soon as they are extracted from the vault. All there is to it is point Signed, Sealed & Delivered to the right location of the executable and set the additional parameters which specify how files are passed to the antivirus program for scanning (depends on each antivirus software).
Mail settings is where all details for properly sending the message and the vault are stored. Users have to provide the SMTP server address, the port and authentication credentials. The shady part in this tab is that you can provide any email address with any domain you want into "Sender" field. Testing this I inputed a fake [email protected] address and sent a message to a colleague of mine. At a first glance he was bewildered by the sender but a look at the message source and the fact that with each vault sending the recipient would get a download link for the software in order to open the vault would reveal the hoax.
The application is easily maneuverable and the price is not that bitter, the vaults are created with little effort, if any and adding files and folders to them is piece of cake. Trial version comes fully functional for a period of 30 days so you have plenty of time to test it. However, there are minor details to be taken care of (the unhandled exception when deleting multiple files).
The Good
All options are in plain view and the skinnable interface offers seven alternatives for modifying the looks (although the default looks great).
It does not take long to create secured vaults and you can protect them with a 64 characters long password (the only trouble is remembering it).
Each time you send a protected vault via email a link for downloading the application will be appended. This way the receiver can easily open up the vault and add files or extract them.
The Bad
The unhandled exception when removing multiple files is not proof of stability for the software. Also, the fact that you can input any email address with any domain is not too good of a thing (many users can be easily fooled this way).
I tried adding a large file (about 1GB) into a vault and the app could not hold them all.
The Truth
The application does a great job with sending the vaults via email and you can use it for storing sensitive data on you r hard drive (the downside is that vaults are not secured against deletion).
There are details to work on and I hope future versions will incorporate at least support for larger vaults and data encryption.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
