GPG and Email

• When working with email, there are two ways to add gpg into the mix: clearsigning messages and encrypting messages
• A clearsigned message is useful when you want to guarantee that people know who the message was sent by, but don't want/need to encrypt the data
• The signature is based on your key and the content of your message
• Your email reader will render the clearsigned message in such a way that you know the message was signed. Under pine, it looks like:

  	Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 11:22:12 -0500 (EST)
  	From: Mandi 
  	To:  
  	Subject: testing clearsign
  
  	-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
  	Hash: SHA1
  
  
  	testing clearsign
  
  	-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
  	Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)
  	Comment: For info see http://quantumlab.net/pine_privacy_guard/
  
  	iD8DBQE+OqK0zR3Kqnd26TYRAqA5AKCouIBErvDQd0mksC2rdyDJzy2TxgCg3XGZ
  	Jsx4Tab7nz/9c9kglM23CfE=
  	=ay+d
  	-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
  	

  Or it could be an attachment, with a message appearing at the bottom of the message:

  	Some Dude - somed@domain.org - sdude@other.net - http://www.other.net/~sdude 
  	Private personal mail: use PGP key 12345678; more sensitive data? Use 09876543
  
  	    [ Part 2, Application/PGP-SIGNATURE  240bytes. ]
  		[ Cannot display this part. Press "V" then "S" to save in a file. ]
  	

• When a message is to be encrypted, you'll need to use the email address associated with that key. People may add email addresses to their main key or generate new keys for each of their addresses
• When you choose to send an encrypted message, your email client will search your gpg keyring for the correct key for the receiver's email address.

Back Up Next

http://www.linuxchick.org/gpg