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Email Encryption

If you want to send an encrypted email, until the Office 365 Encrypted Email feature is rolled out, the best options are either encrypted Office documents or 7-Zip encrypted archives. For instructions on how to use these see below:

Office File Encryption

An easy way to encrypt information that is already held in an Office document is to put a password on it, this automatically encrypts it too.

From within the file you wish to encrypt:

  1. Click on the Tools menu at the top of the screen
  2. Select the Protect Document... option
  3. Set a strong password to open the document - preferably using upper and lower case characters, numbers and symbols. You will need to re-enter the password.
  4. You can also set a password to modify the document if you wish.
  5. Click OK.
  6. Save the document.

7-Zip

7-Zip is good for encrypting containers, so if you have more than one file to encrypt it's particularly useful.

To create an encrypted archive

  1. From any Windows Explorer window (e.g. My Documents), right-click on the file or folder you want to encrypt.
  2. Select 7-Zip and then Add to archive.
  3. Select the Archive format .7z offers better compression (makes the files smaller) but .zip is usually a better choice because it offers better compatibility with other programs, such as WinZip.
  4. In the Encryption section, enter a strong password and select AES-256 as the encryption method.

To Extract files from an archive

  1. Right click on the archive, and click Extract files.
  2. In the window that appears, select where to extract the files to and enter the password for the archive.
  3. Click OK and the files will be unencrypted and extracted to the location you specified.

Office 365 Encrypted Email

This is a feature that will be coming soon.

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