On a recent project for a customer, they needed to send me some keys to connect to their company VPN server. Email is not secure by default, and anyone could intercept the keys along the way which could compromise the security of their company intranet.
With the usage of GPG signing and encryption, we can not only verify the sender of the emails, but also encrypt the data so that if it were intercepted, it could not be read. These are the steps I went through to set up GPG with Apple’s Mail.
- Installed GNU Privacy Guard
- Installed GPG Keychain Access
- Launch GPG Keychain Access
- Choose to generate a new key - used all the default values
- Exported my public key and sent to client as .txt file
- Imported public key from client into GPG Keychain Access
- Installed GPGMail - plug-in for Apple Mail
For more information about configuring GNUPG for a variety of MacOSX email clients, read this howto: Configuring GNUPG
If you’re using Windows, take a look at GPG4Win (found via Jon Stahl’s blog)
Technorati Tags: apple, encryption, gpg, macintosh, pgp, privacy, email, security
I’ve had similar needs, but each time I’ve used GPGMail with AppleMail I’ve experienced weird problems wherein most or all of my messages are re-marked as unread even after I’ve read them. I get a lot of email, so this is a big problem. What I do now is use Thunderbird with Enigmail when I’m dealing with GPG-encrypted emails, and AppleMail (sans GPGMail) the rest of the time.
My setup:
OS X 10.4.9
AppleMail Version 2.1.1 (752.3)
GPGMail (current at the time)
all email via IMAP over SSL
Graham
I had the same problem, all my mail was being remarked as unread. Annoying.