Secure email (CORA encryption)
In the app: Compose › Secure
A secure email is encrypted with CORA before it leaves your device. Your email provider, and anyone else who gets a copy of the message, sees only a short notice and a block of scrambled text. Each secure email gets its own brand-new key.
Before you start
- Sign in to your goCORA account — goCORA asks you to if you aren't.
- Set up your multi-device PIN and enter it on this device. If it isn't open here, goCORA says "To send secure email, your multi-device PIN must be set up and entered on this device" and offers to open your goCORA account page.
Sending a secure email
- Start a new message, a reply or a forward (Compose).
- Tap Secure in the toolbar. It is off for every new message. When it's on, a lock appears, the banner "This message will be encrypted with CORA" shows above the message, and the Send button becomes Send Secure. Tap Secure again to turn it off.
- Write your message as usual and tap Send Secure.
- Attachments can't be sent securely yet. goCORA asks you to remove them, or to turn off Secure and send the message normally.
- AI on a secure draft: if you use ✨ while Secure is on, goCORA asks first. The AI sees the text of the draft to help you write it; the email itself is still encrypted when you send it.
- A secure email is always sent as plain text (no formatting).
What the recipient sees
The message starts with this notice, followed by the encrypted block:
This is an encrypted email that requires the goCORA app to decrypt. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----BEGIN CORA MESSAGE----- Key-Id: … (encrypted text) -----END CORA MESSAGE-----
Reading a secure email
Open the message (for example in your Sent folder). goCORA recognizes the encrypted block, decrypts it and shows the banner Encrypted with CORA above the text. To decrypt, goCORA needs:
- The key — kept on the device that sent the message, in goCORA's encrypted storage.
- You signed in — otherwise: "To read this secure message, sign in to your goCORA account."
- Your multi-device PIN open on this device — otherwise: "To read this secure message, enter your multi-device PIN on your goCORA account page."
The key of each secure email is protected twice: by this device and by your multi-device PIN. Someone who copies the device's files without your PIN, or who learns your PIN without the device, still can't read the message. A backup account uses the same PIN, so it can read them too.
After a PIN reset: recovering older secure emails
Changing your PIN keeps everything readable. Resetting it (when you've forgotten it) creates a new security key, so secure emails sent before the reset can't be read until goCORA moves their keys to the new one. Before you reset, goCORA tells you how many secure emails on that device depend on the current key.
There are two ways to recover them, both within 3 months of the reset:
- Automatically. If the PIN was reset on another device, a device that still remembered the old PIN recovers its own secure emails by itself as soon as you enter the new PIN there. goCORA says "goCORA recovered N secure email(s)…". So after a reset, open goCORA and enter the new PIN on each of your devices — the sooner the better.
- With your old PIN. When automatic recovery isn't possible, the goCORA account page shows, in orange, how many secure emails are still protected with the old key, the last day you can recover them and how many days are left. Tap Recover older secure emails and type the old PIN.
Opening such a message before it's recovered shows: "This secure message is protected with your old security key… Recover it on your goCORA account page with your old PIN." After the 3 months, the account page says they can't be read any more.
Coming soon: keeping a received secure email
When recipients can read secure emails, goCORA will also let a recipient save a received secure email in one of two ways:
- With their own key — the message stays encrypted, now protected by the recipient's own multi-device PIN, so it no longer depends on the sender.
- As plain text — the message is kept decrypted on the recipient's device, like an ordinary email.
This page will be updated when that's available.