Panda Network Presents
At Panda Network we are super excited to show what we’ve been using internally over the past months. Hope this little button will help some others out there as well.
Sending emails are secure, but storing them forever may not be the best idea. Some things in life you just want to keep private, because they are sensitive, like passwords, financial information , or the email conversation with the person you had a fling with on new years eve. These kind of emails are just needed for ten seconds, after that it might not be a good idea to store them forever. Good news for Gmail users. Now you have Snapmail as a Chrome Extension.
I’m always hesitating to send passwords over email, and while working on Panda remotely, sometimes William Channer and I find ourselves sending passwords over email. Even though I’m deleting them from my sent folder,
there is no guarantee that the recipient would do the same. As a Snapchat fan that’s how I ended up implementing this buttonish idea Snapmail.
How does it work?
Just send your emails by using the Snapmail button and the content of the email will be encrypted with a hash generated on the client-side. And a link to your message will be generated and replaced with your actual message.
And at the time when the recipient accesses the message it will be deleted from Snapmail servers making it unavailable for anyone to access on second click, even the recipient. Also the message will be disappearing from the recipient’s screen after 20 seconds, ensuring security in case they forgot to close the tab.
Sample generated link:
https://snapmail.co/mail.html?id=e993e65e-7e07-498d-a73b-ebc774d22d76#F8o9gH
Security
Snapmail is secure with military grade encryption. Your email is encrypted using AES algorithm and stored on SnapMail servers. When you press the send button the recipient receives a link to the encrypted content. The encryption key is generated on your browser and included in the link. SnapMail does not get the encryption key so it cannot read your messages. When the recipient clicked the link, the email content is deleted from SnapMail servers, forever.
Sample Snapmail content at Snapmail servers:
U2FsdGVkX1+dbmkCHf5FF35aMmp5nMDusXDHTQJ9q0b7PVTLuK6ODVv6rchH7Wrc /8QOESSL+GNPFM4obKg6OZh6fEjd1quPvNS+H17NBW/suaQk19WnshNdaGTUQv6c SDawg8YTNQkB8PsvLJisQ7y8pnxZpZkmb8LL0oCiXvQFl8m8/Zl9M7peyQqL5WmS uq5D5+HQmjm0lOVd63HZgxgXE1rAkq/d7YOgNMUxFYo=
Snapmail was a weekend project by Panda Network, and the back-end was developed by Cenk Alti in golang. After that it took for me a while to prepare the landing and fine tune the extension while working on Panda 4. The development roadmap includes Firefox and Safari extension.
We’re planning to support other browsers & email providers as well. For now Snapmail is only supporting text messages. So, don’t send your secret files or private pictures using Snapmail. Right now, your pictures and attachments can be exposed in the future, like before :)
