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PGP for Newbies

Do you cringe at the idea of people snooping on your email and through the files on your computer? Encryption is the only way to be absolutely certain you can keep your private stuff really private. Even if you are a newbie, encryption can be surprisingly easy -- if you use the free PGP program, the encryption technique so powerful that it is illegal to use in some countries!  The following GTMHH was written by Keydet89 <keydet89@yahoo.com>, so if you want to ask questions, email him and not me! (Carolyn Meinel).

This Guide will tell you about:
[Creating your own keys]
[Importing keys]
[Creating a group of keys]
[Making your public key public]
[Encrypting Files]
[Encrypting your email]

PGP is a personal encryption program that you can use to encrypt files or email.

PGP is 'Pretty Good Privacy', originally created by Phil Zimmerman. The long and short of the story is that Phil released his encryption program to the public and was investigated by the federal government. As soon as the investigation was closed, Phil started a company based on his product, which was later purchased by Network Associates.

You can get the freeware version of PGP from:
http://web.mit.edu/network/pgp.html

Note: All of the examples used in this Guide are performed
using PGPfreeware 6.0. The link above is for this version.

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NEWBIE NOTE: How to use PGP will be described, but if you
want to make it a little easier to use, download the Eudora
email client and install PGP's Eudora plug-in. The tools
from PGP appear as icons on the toolbar in Eudora, and
encrypting or decrypting an email is as easy as selecting
an icon.

To get Eudora freeware to use with PGP, go to:
http://www.eudora.com/products/
************************************************************

Once you have the PGP freeware program, double-click on the
icon to install it. Just follow the instructions, they are very straight-forward, and there are no tricks or surprises along the way. You will have to reboot your computer, though, but when you do, PGP Tray should be in your Startup group, and there will be a little lock icon on the TaskBar.

NOTE: For the purposes of this Guide, PGP 6.0 was installed on NT 4.0/SP 3. However, there should be no great difference with 95/98.

Your Own Keys | Importing Keys | Public Keys | Encrypting Email