I think its a shame that email encryption and signing isn’t more prevalent on the Internet. As a technology that has been mature for over 10 years, there is little or no built-in OS support for it in either Windows or OS X. The latest version of Ubuntu Linux, however, happen to have built-in support for Gnu Privacy Guard, the GPL free implementation of PGP encryption and identity verification.

This software is capable of both making sure that only the recipient can access the email you send them (pretty good when using a public mail server, like Google or Yahoo, for example), and also to guarantee that the person in the “from” field is actually the person who sent the email.

In fact, if GPG became a part of the SMTP standard protocol (or even became used commonly), it would serve to thin out the majority of spam mail, as well as phishing email attempts.

So, in an attempt to get GPG used a little more often, you should read the book Cryptonomicon. Aside from providing excellent information on what GPG is and why you should use it, it is an excellent adventure story.

Then, take a look at the following guide to add GPG support to OS X Leopard.

Click on for my public GPG key …