[HOWTO] - Digitaly Sign and Encrypt Email using Apple Mail

[profx]

I have been looking around for a while to a way to do this on my Mac, I looked a PGP programs on version tracker etc.

But i found this tutorial

http://www.joar.com/certificates/

It gives step by step instructions on how to get your very own digital certificate from thawte (thats free) to sign email and so people sending you mail can encrypt messages for you.

The process is fairly painless and takes about 10 -15 mins after which you will have a private and public key set to sign and encrypt messages from with apple mail.

Digital signatures are a great way of ensuring the person that sends and email is actually the owner of that email address (you can tell if the message has been modified or if the sender was the one who actually sent the email).

This is particulary handy if you get messages from your friends saying you have sent them viruses or spam - as a result of someone else having their address book stolen

If its not signed then its not from me!

 

[dlloyd]

Hmmm, sounds interesting. I might have to try it!

 

[Ricky]

I've been wanting to do this for a long time but never found a guide to do so. This is perfect. Thanks!

 

[Giaguara]

http://macgpg.sourceforge.net/
http://www.gnupg.org/ other good starts

 

[rbuenger]

Why not using the original PGP. Ok you have to pay a small amount for it but it's ways better that GnuPG... I used GnuPG and some others like OpenPG bevor and they worked most the time (sometimes not compatible with a new PGP version) but they are nothing compared to PGP Personal Edition with a perfect integration in Mail, encyption services for diskimages or the clipboard....

In most cases I love to use OpenSource and free software (have lot of them installed and compiled) but GnuPG is definitly not one of them anymore. The only positiv I can say about GnuPG is that it don't cost money.

 

[Giaguara]

GnuPG is open source, PGP proprietary software.