A chaotic optical communication system based on external optical feedback is constructed. By introducing the Langevin noise sources, the master-slave rate equations including spontaneous emission noise characteristics are deduced. Utilizing the obtained mathematical model, two kinds of possible chaos synchronization in the system, i.e. complete chaos synchronization and generalized mode-locking chaos synchronization, are studied. The effects of the spontaneous emission noises of the two lasers on the two types of synchronization as well as the chaotic outputs of the transmitter and receiver are discucsed. Finally, for a sequence of pseudorandom digital bits at 2.5Gb/s bit rate, the encoding/decoding process basing on chaotic masking method is presented, and the effects of noise on decoding performance are examined.