Securely deleting mail and attachments from my mac

If they were deleted and not retained in a Mail trash folder, about the best thing I could suggest is to do an "erase free space" on your hard drive. That is an option in Disk Utility (found in /Applications/Utilities folder). Launch Disk Utility, click on your hard drive icon, click on the "Erase" tab, and click on the "Erase Free Space" button. This takes a while to run ... a long while. Kick it off before you go to bed and it may be finishing up by tomorow morning or certainly by the time you get home from work tomorrow afternoon.

If they are still in a Deleted folder or Trash folder in Mail, you could browse through your $HOME/Library/Mail folder and look in all of its mail account folders for anything related to Trash or Deleted. Drag those to the Trash then under the "Finder" item on the menu bar, choose "Secure Empty Trash" item. Attachments are stored in your $HOME/Users/jv/Library/Mail Downloads folder. Same drill, drag anything there that you want to eliminate to the Trash and do "Secure Empty Trash."

No, I haven't really paid attention to that aspect with Spotlight and Mail. I never assumed that Mail securely deleted anything, though. That's why I cobbled together a little unix script that launches once every three months and does a "wipe free space" on my hard drive. I'd run it more frequently but it takes forfreakinever even with a 320MB drive doing just a single pass.

If you aren't into writing up your own unix scripts to do junk like this, you could set up an iCal event to remind you to kick off disk utility's wipe free space option every so often and let it run overnight.

As far as suggesting a secure wipe feature of Mail's trash, I think that that would be a really good idea. If you and a bunch more people suggested that through their feedback site, they might actually consider implementing something like that. If only a handful of people do, nothing will happen. But if a thousand do, they might actually do something with that. So (you and everybody reading this) pay a visit to http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html and make the suggestion. I just did.

Just thought I'd let y'all know about something...

New with Leopard is the hidden area /private/var/folders. Use Finder's "Go to folder..." menu command and enter /private/var/folders to see it. Inside you'll find a bunch more folders with cryptic names. Dig deep enough in there and you'll find copies of some of your data, that OS X has copied there without your knowledge. Data you thought you deleted. I have found copies of e-mail attachments and even some of my web browsing history in there. Wiping free space won't clear this data.

I am not making this up.

I just tested it out now. Just now I went to an attachment in an e-mail I received today, and dragged it to the Desktop. Then I put it in the trash and emptied the trash. Low and behold, I just found a copy of it here:

/private/var/folders/hc/hcsGC7id2Ra4H +BYnu3q+++TI/-Tmp-/com.apple.mail.drag-T0x7102e0.tmp.LJKF72/Blank Bkgrd.gif

Even if I had been using FileVault, where my home folder and Trash is all encrypted, this file gets copied outside to an unencrypted area without my knowledge.

Now, that document of mine is not sensitive at all, and if my Mac was stolen it's not likely that a casual thief would find it anyway. But this is quite scary nonetheless.

I sent a security bug report to Apple about this a long, long time ago. It is still listed as open.

The moral of the story: Don't trust Mac OS X to really delete your personal data when you tell it to. Physical security of your Mac is the only real way to go.

Hello all,

has this security bug been fixed in Snow Leopard?
Can I now safely delete all my data, pictures, internet browsing history etc?
Forever? A 100% safe?

Other people use this Mac at times..............so I was just wondering!!

Cheers,

Not a Clue

The easiest way to deal with multiple users on a Mac is to set up separate user accounts for those people. It's like every person having his or her own Mac, and your own documents, email, browser history, etc., are safe from prying eyes. Instructions here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/15191.html

Why thank you Jay.

But we have grown into this culture of using one account, which is really no big deal.
My question is really about the Browsing history etc, is it possible to delete this a 100%?

Cheers,

Not a Clue.