0

Not sure if this is the right place for this question, but I'm looking for a way to establish secure inbound email traffic from external senders with an automated decryption mechanism within my organization.

Our workflows require that emails flow into a document management system, and TLS-encrypted emails do not support this. Curious if it is possible to configure a mechanism where:

  1. External parties send TLS-encrypted emails to a mailbox
  2. Automated mechanism decrypts the email and forwards a decrypted version to a secondary mailbox
  3. Document management system integrates with secondary mailbox

Apologies, not my area of expertise!

Improve this question
4
  • 3
    TLS is encryption over the wire of data in transit, not encryption at rest, the end point of a TLS connection always has the data decrypted. I think you're looking for a product. A mail server that receives incoming mail, including over TLS (which all of them should be able handle) and stores it into your document management system (possibly using a little custom code to tell it how). What is your mail setup like now? Is it open source, is it MS Exchange?
    – Z.T.
    Commented Mar 3, 2021 at 15:53
  • Thanks for the response! We use Mimecast and an on-prem Exchange server.
    – Leo
    Commented Mar 3, 2021 at 20:06
  • 1
    TLS or decryption has nothing to do with your issue. You need some IT consulting, I think. You need to decide which Document Management System to use and how it should work. How will recipients find out they received an email and access the email. Then you need to decide where the code that handles copying/moving email from Mimecast or from Exchange to your DMS should be and whether it already exists or whether you need to write it (pay someone to write it). security.SE won't help much with this. Maybe serverfault.com is more suitable.
    – Z.T.
    Commented Mar 3, 2021 at 23:08
  • @Z.T. Much appreciated - thanks!
    – Leo
    Commented Mar 3, 2021 at 23:09

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

Yes. Most Mail Transport Agents (MTA's), such as Exim, Postfix, etc. have the ability to receive incoming mail from sending MTA's by way of TLS, so that the transport of messages from the sending MTA to the receiving MTA is through a TLS connection. Most MTA's also have the ability to forward all incoming mail to a script running locally on the MTA. You can cook up a small script (e.g. in python) that receives each incoming message as it comes in, and do whatever you need with it. See https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/406026/redirect-all-incoming-email-to-a-python-script as a starting point.

Another possibility is to write python script that runs on a different host, that pops the incoming messages from the receiving MTA's POP3 server via POP3 (or possibly IMAP). See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8669202/get-emails-with-python-and-poplib for more info on this.

Improve this answer
1
  • Thanks for the response! Pardon the delay in replying. Really appreciate it.
    – Leo
    Commented Mar 18, 2021 at 16:37

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .