Can SNS send encrypted email?

Question

I'm trying to setup an exception reporting mechanism with node.js, the logging lib winston, and AWS's SNS. The basic idea is that when node.js crashes, winston will publish the stacktrace to SNS, which will then email me at a gmail email address. My question is about encryption: does SNS send email in the clear? I would want my exceptions and stack traces to be obfuscated from snoopers, for obvious reasons.

Answer 1

If you want email encryption, you'll need to implement it yourself using GPG. GPG is the only 'safe' way to send encrypted email -- the way it works is like so:

• You generate a keypair for yourself (private / public key).
• You get your email text you want to send, run it through GPG, and tell it to encrypt it with yourself as the destination.
• You send it off encrypted.
• Then only you can open the email with your private key -- even if it is sent in plain text it doesn't matter.

You might find the GPG site useful (it has a tutorial): https://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual.html

Hope that helps!