As some might know, PGP is a way to encrypt or sign messages. I’m using GPG (Hey you misspelled it,- no i did not) for quite a while now and thought i’d write this little post about it. First of all some background.
PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy and became commercial some years ago. GPG is the free alternative. GPG can be used to encrypt and decrypt messages and documents using certificates. For _all_ the information on PGP visit Wikipedia. Though you should use GPG.
So how does it work? Well Each party creates a Public and a Private key. The Public
is the one that you send to other parties and the Private is the one you should guard with your life. When someone encrypts a message with your Public Key, your Private key allows you to decrypt it, and since it is signed with the others Public key, the matching Private key allows for decryption as well.
Anyway, Why is encrypting e-mail important? For some people / messages it’s not important at all. For some other people/messages it might be, but who is to decide?
I am not going to write a tutorial on how-to set it up because there are a lot of em already out there and much better as what i could do in this short period of time.
Instead you can/should use Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=howto+gpg
Enigmail is a thunderburd plugin that allows encrypting/decrypting messages as well as managing your keys.
FireGPG has recently been discontinued but still works with GMail. I would like to thank the author: Maximilien for all the time he has given the project and wish him the best of luck.
Also checkout: http://www.gnupg.org/
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