If you're a user of Outlook on Windows, then you're probably aware of a product called Pretty Good Privacy. PGP was originally written in 1991 by Phil Zimmerman and has subsequently grown up into the leading tool for sending and receiving encrypted email - due in no small part to its tight integration with Outlook.

The product came in a number of versions but the gist was that if you wanted to use it for corporate use, that attracted a fee, whereas the "personal edition" was free.

Not so long ago, PGP was bought lock, stock and two smoking barrels by Network Associates, and this put paid to the free product - if you find the software on the internet now it's (a) out of date, as it's no longer being developed and (b) probably illegal.

There is an answer. PGP isn't just one product - it's just a way of doing encrypted email. There have been free alternatives on the UNIX platforms for a while, but they're tricky to use - although in the past couple of years email programs have started to integrated these features.

The premier Open Source, Free As In Libre, Can't Be Crushed By The Corporate Monolith product is a program called [link|http://www.gnupg.org|gpg], short for "GNU Privacy Guard". Naturally, this is Free forever and ever. Naturally, it's damn good. Naturally, it's a complete bastard to use.

So I've been using GPG for a while now, via my mail client on Linux, [link|http://www.ximian.com/products/ximian_evolution/|Ximian Evolution], which has strong features for using GPG to sign and encrypt/decrypt mail. I also use the [link|http://www.gnupg.org/gpa.html|GNU Privacy Assistant], which is functionally equivalent to PGPKeys.

So what has this to do with Windows? Well, the port of gpg to the Windows platform is somewhat bare. The functionality is there, if you like encrypting/signing things at a command line, copying it to the clipboard, and pasting it into your message.

There's a plugin for Outlook Express which takes away a lot of the pain, but this doesn't work with Outlook and has no key management.

Enter [link|http://www.gdata.de|G Data]. They have created a tool called the [link|http://www3.gdata.de/gpg/|GnuPG-Plugin] which provides nice clicky buttons for signing, encrypting and decrypting mail from within outlook. Even better, they've done a port of GPA so that key management on Windows is no longer the preserve of PGPKeys!

I've got this installed. It works. Nuff said.

Will it use the older PGP keys that I have been using or do I need to create new ones?

No, you can import your old keys into gpg's keyring.

I have maybe one or two friends that use PGP actively, the rest either don't know how to use it or don't care. Will GPGP allow me to send encrypted messages that the older version of PGP will be able to read?

Yep.

I have Outlook 2000, which I use for my email. I know I should use something better and Non-MS, but what? Outlook clicks with the Timex Datalink watch so well, and also can easily synch up with a Palm Pilot or Windows CE device. I'd need an Outlook replacement to do all of that.

I'm running this in Outlook 2002, so I can't imagine Outlook 2000 will not work.

Thanks for the info, bookmarked it, and will visit it later.

Bitte.