Patent ID: 8321669

Claim:
A system for communicating electronic messages to a recipient, the system comprising: a communications network having a plurality of network devices connected thereto; a mail server connected to the communications network and is operable to store electronic messages for access by the recipient; a first network device in the plurality of network devices, the first network device being employed by the recipient to access electronic messages from the mail server; a second network device in the plurality of network devices operable to generate an encrypted electronic message for communication to the recipient, the encrypted electronic message comprising encrypted message data corresponding to a message for the recipient encrypted by a symmetric encryption algorithm using a session key and encrypted session key data corresponding to the session key encrypted by an asymmetric encryption algorithm using a public key associated with the recipient; an encryption key server connected to the communications network, the encryption key server being remote from the first network device, the second network device, and the mail server; wherein in response to a request to access an encrypted message stored by the mail server, the mail server is operable to extract said encrypted session key data from said encrypted electronic message for forwarding to the encryption key server, and in response to receipt of said encrypted session key data, the encryption key server is operable to recover the session key, by decrypting the encrypted session key data using a private key associated with the recipient, for forwarding to a remote network device, whereby the remote network device is operable to recover said message from the encrypted message data using the session key recovered by the encryption key server.