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Comment by Joeboy | Hacker News Reader

I set up my first PGP key in 1998, and I have as yet never received a PGPed email from anybody except myself. So it's exciting that I might finally do so.

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I use GPG/PGP to sign my mails, using PGP/Mime, not inline PGP, which creates an ugly mail header that will confuse many readers. My mail has a signature.asc file, and sometimes I get a question about this. Then I explain. The most surprising about this is that most people don't ask anything. Maybe they figure it out, but I doubt that. I do this to introduce the concept to other people.

I sign emails too, for the same reason. I got the most different reactions, up to "Careful, you have a virus that put a lot of strange characters in your email".

Do you have a standard text you use to explain what it is? I confess, I planned to write it, but it's still on my to-do list…

I don't routinely do it anymore myself, but I had an one liner "May contain a digital signature to ensure integrity" and noone asked me any questions.

Not my website, nor do I know the website owner, but I often use http://futureboy.us/pgp.html.

Provides a good overview of PGP/GPG, and more or less gives enough instruction that someone could set it up on their own provided they were more technically inclined. Either way, if they were interested, this would be a good enough starting point I think.

Yes, I know that one! Unfortunately this starts way further down the road of computer knowledge than does who ask me if I caught a virus… :/

How about https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/ ?

Update: Somebody just sent me a PGP'ed email! Encrypted to my 1998 key, to which I no longer have the private key :-(

For this reason, I've learned to encrypt my first-ever email keys (from 2013 -- hey, I'm young) into an encrypted disk image that I can mount from any computer sync'd on the cloud.

Do you have a new PGP key? Provide us a fingerprint, short ID, link or whatever, and you'll get mail ;)

66DB D820 C755 1E5E 2339 ABEC 98A3 E568 5745 0109

Edit: Achievement unlocked, thanks Iain and Seth.

I know those feels; I had an old PGP key (private key and passphrase now both lost) linked to my old AOL account (long gone, of course) using my old surname (been married eleven years now), but registered with the MIT server back in 1997, so it's still visible to the world. It's like a digital version of some mysterious, unopenable time capsule.

I have only ever sent one encrypted email, but that was by accident. Turns out Thunderbird + enigmail will default to encrypt the email if you have your recipients key.

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