Password protection in MAIL

[macswitcha2]

Is there a way I can prevent people using my computer from seeing my email in MAIL?

 

[robbieduncan]

Log them into the guest account.

 

[GGJstudios]

Set up a separate user account for others to use. There is no way to password-protect an application.

 

[CJS7070]

Not really, you can only require a password to connect to the server. You can't put a password on it to prevent launching it, or reading e-mail that is stored locally.

 

[macswitcha2]

how do I have it so that if Mail launches one has to put a password to connect to the server?

 

[GGJstudios]

how do I have it so that if Mail launches one has to put a password to connect to the server?

Mail > Preferences > Accounts > select the account > Account Information > delete the password.

Again, your already-downloaded mail will still be visible.

 

[karohan]

If you are willing to switch email clients, try out Thunderbird. It has the exact feature you are looking for. You can password protect your inbox and none of your current messages will be visible until you enter the password.

 

[munkery]

I find a good way to password protect my email is to do the following:

Store your keychain entry for Mail in a separate keychain than your Login keychain. This allows you to have a very secure email password that is too hard to remember while having an easier to remember password used locally for your email account via keychain.

Setup your email account in Mail using IMAP and delete any security sensitive email locally from your computer after it has been read so that mail is only stored on the server. You have to set it up such that when you delete email within Mail, the email is not deleted on the server.

Given that your Mail keychain entry is not in your Login keychain, Mail will ask for the other keychain's password to connect to the server.

 

[macswitcha2]

Thanks everyone! I will take all the advise and apply it. May try Thunderbird too.

 

[munkery]

I find a good way to password protect my email is to do the following:

Store your keychain entry for Mail in a separate keychain than your Login keychain. This allows you to have a very secure email password that is too hard to remember while having an easier to remember password used locally for your email account via keychain.

Setup your email account in Mail using IMAP and delete any security sensitive email locally from your computer after it has been read so that mail is only stored on the server. You have to set it up such that when you delete email within Mail, the email is not deleted on the server.

Given that your Mail keychain entry is not in your Login keychain, Mail will ask for the other keychain's password to connect to the server.

A problem with the method I outlined previously is that the emails are still accessible through Users/~/Library/Mail and Users/~/Library/Mail Downloads. The emails are not accessible via the Mail app UI but they can still be navigated to and viewed in Finder. I found this guide online if you want to protect access to these folders as well. I have not tried it myself.

Get both the Mail.app and my email onto a password protected drive.
Process:
1. Open Disk Utility to create the encrypted DMG /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app
2. Click “New Image” on the top
3. Select a Name and a save as location
4. Further down under size select the size you expect to store locally
5. Below that make sure select the Encryption
6. Hit create set the password and now you should have a mounted encrypted drive
7. Move your Mail app from /Applications/ to the root of your mounted encrypted drive, cut it don’t copy it
8. Then make make an alias of the Mail app in the in the /Applications/ folder
9. Now you need to cut and past your emails to the encrypted drive find the folder /Users/~/Library/Mail and past it in the encrypted drive
10. Now make an alias of the mail folder from you encrypted drive back to the /Users/~/Library/
11. Finished.
If you click the mail icon on the Dock it should now access your mail client and your emails from a secure and encrypted location. if you unmount the drive and click the icon it will prompt you for the password to the dmg then opens the mail app.

 

[munkery]

Another possible means to prevent access to your email via ~/Library/Mail and ~/Library/Mail Downloads is to modify how much of your email is stored locally on your computer.

In Mail -> Preferences -> Accounts -> Advanced, there is a setting to control the specific content from the IMAP server you wish to have locally for offline viewing. It is labelled "Keep copies of messages for offline viewing" (pretty obvious). There are four self explanatory settings, including "Don't keep copies of any messages" that turns off local storage of emails. If used in conjunction with the keychain method in a previous post, your email will be inaccessible without a password. The only downside is that you are unable to view your email offline. Creating an encrypted DMG is not required for this method.