Resolved secure form submission to email account

[JeffreyZ]

I'd like to be able to send form results via email, securely to a gmail user. It seems sendmail by default will send unencrypted. I found a small amount of information online about sending mail via SMTP using PEAR. I didn't see anything about this on the talk.plesk.com website.

To complicate matters, my client that would like to receive secure form results uses Google mail, not mail on my server. So I would guess I cannot use SMTP with his domain.

Is there a simple way to use sendmail or SMTP to submit form results encrypted? Assuming I set up Let's Encrypt of other cert for the domain.

 

[Bitpalast]

If your mail server is equipped with an SSL certificate made out to the hostname of the host that the mail server software is on and what the mail server calls itself, then it will automatically try to connect on a secure connection. However, whether a secure connection can be established or not depends on the receiving server, too. Normally Gmail supports secure connections, but you can never be sure. It is always possible that a connection falls back to an unencrypted transmission if a secure connection fails for some reason. This is the case not only for Gmail, but for all other systems.

I suggest this safe solution for your customer:
1) Create a local mailbox for the customer on your server. Let the form post send mail to this local mailbox only.
2) Configure the Gmail POP3 collection service to download the mail from that mailbox to the customer's Gmail account. This will be done by a secure, encrypted connection (if your server provides the secure POP3 connection, e.g. if you have set the certificate for it in the server certificate panel).
This will let you and your customer out of the responsibility and fuzziness that comes with SMTP secure connections. Local delivery is always secure, and POP3 connector downloads are secure, too.
Here is Google's manual for this: Check emails from other accounts - Computer - Gmail Help

 

[JeffreyZ]

Thanks for your help Peter. I like that simple solution for submitting a form securely.