Virtru Academy Live: Virtru for Gmail 101

Ryan Speaker: Alright, I think we are ready to get started. Thank you everybody for making time today and joining us to talk about the Virtru for Gmail training.

We will talk through what Virtru is and why it is important. I will walk through how you can use Gmail, getting it set up, using it, and the recipient experience. We will talk a little bit about how to get support, and then we will do a live Q&A at the end. Throughout the session, please feel free to submit questions in the channel. I may not get to them as we are going through this live, but we will take time at the end to answer any questions in the Q&A tab.

Also, we will share a recording of the webinar today with captions. If you or people on your team need captioning, that will be available in the recorded version we send out later today.

Let's start with what Virtru is and what our mission is. Our mission is to unlock the power of data by creating a world where it is always under your control everywhere. Privacy is critical. Keeping sensitive information private and only available to the people who should have access to it is important. In some cases it is legally required, and in others, it is a moral imperative, but we want to help people keep control of their data wherever it may be and whomever it is shared with.

Virtru is an email and file encryption tool that works directly inside Gmail. It gives you control over who can access your sensitive data, helps your organization stay compliant, and reduces the risk of a data breach. This is important because it can help you meet regulations, reduce the risk of fines for noncompliance, and control your data so that only authorized recipients get access to it.

I am sure we have all had situations where we have either received emails that were not intended for us or accidentally shared emails with unintended recipients. Virtru helps you maintain control over your data to prevent unauthorized access. It can also help defend your organization's reputation. Breaches can cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, and Virtru keeps you from becoming a statistic and a headline in the news.

At a high level, if there is sensitive information that other people should not access, that is a good time to use Virtru. Here are a few examples: sharing personally identifiable information or personal health information protected under HIPAA or other regulations. Police and fire departments use Virtru for case reports and sharing criminal justice information across different departments. Courts, the Social Security Administration, and human resource teams use it for sharing information about or to employees. Banks, mortgage companies, and various other organizations use us to protect information from getting into the wrong hands and ensuring that only authorized individuals have access.

If you are unsure when you should use Virtru within your organization, please reach out to your administrators. They can give you more guidance on when to use it.

With that background on Virtru and when to use it, we are going to jump into how to use it. We will move into a live demonstration where I will show you how to install it, get it activated on your account, send secure emails, and use the different security options available when sending messages.

We will also talk through the recipient experience. That is just as important as understanding how to send secure messages. What does it look like for the person who has to go through the process of accessing a secure message? Let me switch tabs for just a moment to choose the correct window to share. On the left is a browser window that I will use as the sender of a secure message. On the right, we will use that to go through the recipient experience.

Starting off, Virtru for Gmail is a Chrome extension that you can add through the Chrome Web Store. You can access that by clicking the three dots in the top right of Chrome, clicking extensions, and visiting the Chrome Web Store. I know in 2026, there are a lot of different Chrome-based browsers out there, including Microsoft Edge, Arc, Brave, and a handful of others. While some extensions can be installed in other web browsers, Virtru is only supported in Google Chrome. Regardless of your personal preference for a web browser, please make sure you are using Chrome when using Virtru. From the Chrome Web Store, I will type in Virtru, find the extension, and add it to Chrome. A prompt will say that it can change data on websites. This is just saying it can modify the emails, which we have to do in order to encrypt them.

Now it is installed. There is a Virtru webpage that can walk you through a couple of things, but I am going to close these tabs and go back over to my Gmail inbox. Gmail has already detected that I installed the Virtru extension and is prompting me to activate it. When I click that, a new tab opens, completes some authentication, and sends me back to the inbox to tell me I am ready to go.

Once that is done, I can compose a new email. You will see up at the top that Virtru protection is initially turned off. I can click the toggle, and the banner changes at the top to show that the message is secure. You will also notice at the bottom that the send button has changed into a secure send button. I will enter my recipient's email address and type out an email as I normally would.

I can also attach files just like a normal email. I will select my document and add it in. You will see it shows that it is being added as a secure attachment. When the little icon shows up on the side, I know it is attached and I am ready to send.

Before I send this email, I will show you a few different security options that are available. If you do not want people to forward your emails, we can disable forwarding. If the recipient tries to share it, the other person in the chain will not be able to access the secure message.

I can also set an expiration date. I can add however many days, months, or weeks I want. Once it hits the expiration date, I will still have access to it as the sender, but the recipient will no longer be able to access the message. They will get an error when they attempt to view it.

If we need to be highly secure with our emails and attachments, we can add watermarking. When the recipient accesses the message, it will display their email address all over it. If they take a screenshot or a picture with their cell phone, it will be very clear who shared that secure document.

There is also an option called persistent protection. Persistent protection prevents people from downloading the file to their computer. If they want to access it, they need to do so through our secure reader, our web-based reader for files and emails. This prevents the file from being downloaded locally and shared. If there is something that absolutely should not leave a secure system, you can enable persistent protection, and that user will always have to view the file within a web browser.

With that, my email is ready to go. I click secure send, I get a message that it is encrypting, and that is it. My message is sent. Now I am moving over to the recipient experience. These are test accounts, so usually our messages do not go to spam. As a trusted sender, things will show up in the inbox.

With this message in the inbox, I am going to click on it. Your recipient will get a message saying the sender is using Virtru to send and receive encrypted emails. You can add some unencrypted custom messaging to show the person this is a legitimate email and that they should click through to access it. I am going to click unlock message, which takes me to the Virtru Secure Reader. I seem to already be signed in, so let me sign out and we will start from the beginning. I will click unlock message again. This will prompt me to sign in. I select my email address, and I can either sign in with my Google credentials or send a verification email.

Back in the inbox, I get a verification email from Virtru. I can either enter the code or click verify me. That will open a new tab and take me to the secure message. You can see the encrypted message I sent and the PDF that I shared. From the secure reader, recipients can also reply back to you securely. Secure messaging does not have to be a one-way street.

Let me go ahead and send a message in here. I will add a file as well. Recipients have the same security options that you do as a Virtru customer. When they are replying back, they can choose to add an expiration date or watermark files, because security should extend to your recipients as well. Virtru encrypts and sends that message, and here it is. For a reply, because I have the Virtru extension installed, it detects a Virtru secure message and automatically decrypts it for me. I do not need to take any special steps as a Virtru customer. It just shows me the message and the attachment.

If you send something out and it turns out it was to the wrong person, you can revoke access directly from the message. If you look at the big red hand icon, we can click it to revoke access so the recipient can no longer view the message. If we switch back to the recipient view, we can see the message that the recipient sent back, but they no longer have access to the original message I sent to them.

Every now and then, usually on a Friday night around 5:00 or 5:30 PM, support will receive a message saying an email was accidentally sent to the wrong person and needs to be revoked before the weekend. The easiest way to do that is right here within the message. If it turns out you revoked it by accident out of an abundance of caution and it was actually the right person, you can simply reauthorize it for them, or send a new secure message, and they will be able to see that information again.

Using Virtru for Gmail is very simple because it lives right inside the Gmail interface you already use every day. It makes securely sending encrypted files to authorized recipients easy, and the security options ensure that the information stays protected. The recipient experience is straightforward: they click a link, verify their identity, and are taken into the secure reader. There, they can read the message, download attachments, and send secure messages back to you, which you can seamlessly read in your Gmail inbox. That is what we have for Virtru for Gmail. It is a very straightforward product to use.