How to use my client?

Kristian Fiskerstrand's blog

The most common implementations of OpenPGP is the free and open source GNU Privacy Guard and the commercial (but it has a freeware version for non-commercial use) PGP Corporation’s

You can use these manually, but it is often common to use a plugin, or a proxy for the email client. This result in the signing and encryption being handled mostly automatic.

That said, by using a shortcut-key or a menu-entry you can use PGP the same way in any application, even for webmail accounts. (PGP freeware has this integrated, for GnuPG you can use Windows Privacy Tray to get shortcut entries and a tray icon for windows and kgpg for GNU/Linux

g10code recently announced the availibility of gpg4win. “gpg4win is a installer package for Windows (95/98/ME/2000/XP/2003) with computer programs and handbooks for EMail and file encryption.”. At the time of writing the manual is only available in German. It features amongst other things the GNU Privacy Assistant (screenshots) which can be used for key management and GPGee which adds OpenPGP support to the windows explorer (allowing to sign / encrypt / verify / decrypt files).

Another approach, that PGP Corp use for its version 9 of the PGP application, is configuring a local proxy, meaning that the application place itself between the email client and the email server. That way you don’t need to use a plugin that depend on the email client. One advantage of using a proxy instead of using eg. a command-line shortcut, is that you also get support for OpenPGP/MIME. In the illustration below, we use GPGRelay as the proxy.

proxy

Email clients that has plugins / require configuration

Here come a list of email applications where you have to install third party plugins for OpenPGP to work. The documentation tend to be fairly well, but if you have problems using them, you can contact us and we can try to help you out.

Email clients with integrated support

The following email application come with built-in support for OpenPGP. So it should be fairly easy to start using it.

Email clients where I would use a proxy

I use the Open Source, and free alternative of the proxy-approach. One such open-source proxy is GPGRelay. I have written a tutorial on configuring first useI use this when dealing with clients such as

A more extensive list of email clients and their support for OpenPGP.

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