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My local city government uses "McAffe Email Encryption". It's not a simple click-to-verify or a greylist or a CAPTCHA. After sending an email requiring a simple response I get an email to sign up for this service. I sign up to actually read the response. There appears to be an option to get this to send email directly, but it then sends another email with a form for a download.

This is an incredibly frustrating process. Is there a workaround or quick way to get this platform to just send me a damn email?

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    Yeah. use webmail.
    – Sathyajith Bhat
    Oct 27, 2011 at 4:56
  • @Sathya I wish it was that simple. I used my Gmail account to send an email to my council representative. To read his reply I had to go through this process with the McAfee tool. Its something the other party uses, not something I use.
    – Freiheit
    Oct 27, 2011 at 14:03
  • If it's something that the other party uses then it's not possible to bypass this.
    – Sathyajith Bhat
    Oct 27, 2011 at 14:04
  • I don't know anyone who's this obnoxious about encrypting mail, and I have no experience with McAffe's system, but in order to receive an encrypted email, you yourself need to do some setup. Specifically, you need a pair of cryptographic “keys”, and the sender of the message somehow needs to get a copy of your public key. It's completely free, and there shouldn't necessarily be any “service”s involved. This McAffe thing sounds to me like it's trying to do something weird and different, which might be less secure than normal mail encryption and|or require you to pay for its “service”s. Dec 31, 2012 at 13:34
  • The short answer? No, it doesn't look like there's a workaround, or any way to get them to just send you a damn (unencrypted) email if they're being this stubborn about it. Since it's a government thing, and if there's no real reason for the message to be guaranteed not to be read by any given third party, I would complain to someone about the system they're using being too hard to use, and get them to just stop trying to make you use mail encryption. Maybe try finding others who have tried to contact them via email and have been frustrated by this. It shouldn't be too hard! Dec 31, 2012 at 13:37

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