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Apple Mail Users – Encrypted Email Stored in Plain Text

November 12, 2019

You would think that if you have an application configured to send and receive encrypted email the expectation is that the messages would be secured. According to a Threat Post report, Apple IT specialist Bob Gendler discovered the problem while he was investigating how macOS and Siri suggest contacts and information to users. Apple's digital assistant goes ahead and stores your emails in plain text on your Mac's drive. Apparently, Apple still knows better what a user really wants. Not.

What's worse is that Siri still saves clear text emails when you have completely disabled Siri on your Mac. A process known as "suggested" will still comb through your emails and dump them into a plaintext Mac database called snippets.db.

According to a post on Gendler's blog, there are three fixes for the Apple screw up. First, disable Siri Suggestions for Mail within the "Siri" section of System Preferences. The second choice is to fire up Terminal and enter the following command:

defaults write com.apple.suggestions SiriCanLearnFromAppBlacklist -array com.apple.mail

Third, you can deploy a System-Level configuration profile to turn off Siri from learning from Apple Mail. Don't forget to delete the snippets.db database as well.

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