I am trying to understand how/if an email I received is being encrypted.
A financial institution sent me a verifiable email (i.e. not phising) asking me to fill out a pdf form to complete a transaction. The outbound email contained my account information and a completed pdf form in my reply would contain even more personal and banking information.
This email contained the words {secure message}
in the subject and instructions to reply specifically to this email to ensure continued security. This message was sent to my gmail account and contained no PGP or S/MIME information. I have never set up any type of prior secure email configuration with this institution.
I replied to the sender expressing my concerns that this did not appear to be a secure means of communication. I was assured that the communication secure and used passwordless encryption provided by ZixCorp.
The company seems to offer 4 email security products:
- ZixGateway
- ZixAccess
- ZixPort
- ZixDirect
ZixPort pulls you to a secure portal to retrieve your message while ZixDirect prompts you for a password in your inbox, neither of which happened. The first two are only supposed to be for receivers with Zix email products. ZixGateway is just a public key-store the enforces rules compliance by chosing a best method of delivery including the above two options.
None of these seem to be describing the passwordless direct-to-inbox email my financial institutions claims is encrypted.
Does anyone know what could be going on? Is this type of encryption even possible?
Update 2014-08-05
Per makerofthings7's comment I checked the MX records for gmail.
$ nslookup -q=mx gmail.com
Server: 130.167.128.4
Address: 130.167.128.4#53
Non-authoritative answer:
gmail.com mail exchanger = 20 alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com mail exchanger = 5 gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com mail exchanger = 30 alt3.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com mail exchanger = 10 alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com mail exchanger = 40 alt4.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
Authoritative answers can be found from:
gmail.com nameserver = ns2.google.com.
gmail.com nameserver = ns4.google.com.
gmail.com nameserver = ns3.google.com.
gmail.com nameserver = ns1.google.com.
ns2.google.com internet address = 216.239.34.10
ns1.google.com internet address = 216.239.32.10
ns3.google.com internet address = 216.239.36.10
ns4.google.com internet address = 216.239.38.10
There is no listing for zixvpm. Any ideas why this might be?