Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG) is an open source PGP clone. It uses strong encryption to protect emails as well as files and folders. For encrypting drives, folders, and files I use a different piece of software (Truecrypt). GPG is my encryption tool for email. The majority of email traffic on the Internet still goes unencrypted, which still amazes me. Many email users don’t know that their email can be easily intercepted and read. PGP’s documentation compares sending email to sending paper postcards, and rightly so. There is no envelope. Any person having access to a mail server or a router could read or automatically filter the many emails that are processed every day. Wireless connections are even more of a problem. There is software which can make email data visible if it is sent over an unencrypted WLAN connection.

So do I encrypt all my email? No. I wish I could, but none of my friends and colleagues uses email encryption. There is only two things I can do: Download my mail with a secure protocol to at least encrypt the last hop, and never forget that emails are like paper postcards that not only the postman can read.

Free encryption software (1): Introduction
Free encryption software (2): File encryption on USB flash drives
Free encryption software (3): Hard disc encryption