Protecting the contents of the profile - mail

All of your messages are normally stored in text files within your profile. Somebody else could read it using Thunderbird or by opening the appropiate file with a text editor. If you want to prevent this the first thing you need to do is decide how much effort to protect your messages is appropiate. Many users use a extension to password protect the profile. This is trivial to bypass but its enough of a nuisance that it meets most peoples needs.

Several methods to consider:

• Install an extension that requires a password in order to use the profile. This can be defeated by launching Thunderbird in safe mode or using notepad to read the stored messages.

• If you have multiple users on a machine as a minimum create a seperate windows user account for each, and use the Thunderbird profile manager to create each profile somewhere other than the default location. This makes it harder to accidentally stumble across each others profiles.

• Use operating system commands to restrict access to the files. For example, if you store your profile on a NTFS partition under Windows 2000 or XP you can right click on the folder in windows explorer, select properties, the security tab, and then specify who has access to that folder. That can be bypassed by somebody else with admin privileges, or by booting another operating system using a live CD such as Knoppix. In a business environment an admin might consider using group or system policy settings to restrict access or store it in password protected file share on a file server.

• Store the profile on a USB/flash disk. They frequently support requiring a password to access the contents, and you can always remove the USB/flash key.

• Store the profile on a password protected encrypted disk partition. This is the most secure solution. You want to use a encrypted disk partition to avoid being prompted to encrypt and decrypt each file. If you're running the pro version of Windows 2000 or XP you can use the Microsoft EFS (Encrypted File System) file system. You could also use the free version of pgpdisk or Axcrypt. If you're running Linux there are many ways to encrypt a partition such as pppd - Practical Privacy Disc Driver