Key Issue

Email communication has become an indispensable part of our daily lives. In addition to private correspondence, it is standard to send business messages by electronic mail. Of course, this means sending all kinds of confidential information across the wire, but you will be hard pressed to find anybody who really worries about the security of this medium, even though messages typically are transmitted in the clear to the recipient. This said, encryption is not exactly rocket science; in fact, thanks to modern software, it is quite simple and convenient.

The Add-On

Enigmail is an add-on for the Thunderbird email client and takes most of the responsibility off the user's shoulders. To do so, the add-on relies on the widespread GnuPG encryption software, which enjoys an reputation for security and supports the OpenPGP standard.

In this article, I will show you how to set up Enigmail and GnuPG and how to use the combination of these two programs to encrypt and sign email under the Ubuntu 7.10 distribution. However, the approach is almost identical for most Linux distributions.

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