The Verde Valley Guidance Clinic is using PGP Universal to secure all outgoing e-mail messages. We are doing this in an effort to comply with HIPAA requirements on securing Personal Health Information and rather than use other methods of key words or other means we decided that the best approach is to encrypt every e-mail that we send. If you have received an e-mail from someone in the clinic and would like information regarding how to retreive the e-mail or which method is best for you please review the following pages.

In order to read the e-mail that was sent to you an e-mail will arrive saying:

You have received a PGP Universal Secured Message from:

Anonymous Coward anonymous@domain.example

To read this message securely, please click this link:

This e-mail will be from the person that sent the e-mail and the subject will be "PGP Universal Secured Message." When you click on the link you will be shown a screen that asks for a password and it will ask you to validate the password. It looks like this:

Once you have done this you will have created an account on our PGP server which will then tell the server how you would like the mail to be delivered to you. There are three choices: Web Messenger, PGP Satellite, and PGP Desktop or S/MIME. Each offers different functionality and is meant for different situations. The screen with the options looks like this:

Web Messenger is where the e-mail will be left on the PGP server and an e-mail informing the recipient that they have an e-mail waiting for them will be sent instead. There will be a link on that e-mail that the recipient will click leading back to the PGP server over an SSL encrypted connection where they then enter a password to retrieve and reply or delete the message. This is secure in that and possible Personal Health Information will not leave the clinic in electronic form. This is only as secure as the recipients password and practices. E-mail will be stored here until deleted. Recipients can respond and send to anyone in the clinic. It will not send to anyone outside the clinic though.

PGP Universal Satellite is a scaled down version of PGP Desktop. It is a program that can be downloaded and installed that will decrypt any messages sent to the account as well as encrypt messages sent back to vvgclinic.org. This requires permissions to install a program on the computer and should really only be done if the recipient will be receiving messages from vvgclinic.org regularly. This allows messages to be sent to the recipients e-mail where they can then be read and stored regularly.

PGP Desktop or S/MIME is if the recipient has a Digital ID or certificate, a PGP keyset, or a GPG keyset. If the recipient has any of these than they can upload the public key or the certificate to the PGP server and any e-mails that are sent from vvgclinic.org will then be encrypted using them and the recipient can then decrypt the message with their key or certificate. The recipient can also encrypt any responses with the sender's certificate.