My colleague Stephan Hochhaus over at yauh.de recently explained he cleaned his PGP key ring and installed GnuPGP. I've been a happy PGP user for quite some time now, too, and wanted to point out some other additional aspects. First, grab my public key if you want!

Instead of GnuPGP I'm using a commercial alternative, available at www.pgp.com the PGP Desktop Email solution. PGP was originally written by Phil Zimmermann, who now serves as a Special Advisor and Consultant at PGP Inc. so they are pretty close to the source of Pretty Good Privacy.

What I like specifically about the commercial PGP Desktop Email solution is:

• It's available for the Mac as a universal binary and for the Windows PC.
• Setting it up is an extremely straight forward several-clicks procedure. It automatically discovers any email traffic and guides you through setting up encryption. You don't want it to interfere with a specific account? No problem, simply tick a checkbox in the wizard and PGP Desktop Email ignores specific accounts.
• It's 100% nonintrusive. You don't have to make any changes to your Outlook, Entourage, Apple Mail, Windows Live Mail or whatsoever email client application. Other solutions I've tried asked me to change mail server addresses to local proxies (127.0.0.1) etc. which I did not want to do for various reasons.
• It fully supports SSL and TLS encrypted connections to mail servers. Transparently.
• It comes with an extendable rules engine. For example I've set up a custom rule that whenever I include the term "nopgp:" into the subject line, it does not transparently encrypt emails. This helps if occasionally I'm sending to mobile colleagues where no PGP solution is available for their handheld devices.
• It is very nicely integrated with the PGP.com key servers at http://keyserver.pgp.com. This includes revoking keys, cross signing, etc.
• It informs accurately about everything it does with little toast notifications and - if you like it - an extensive log.
• The solution includes a secure shredder (if you want to make sure that stuff moved to the trash gets really deleted), PGP Zip and a PGP clipboard which is very helpful if you're reading email through a web reader and want to decrypt contents with a single-click procedure.

Here are some screenshots (click to enlarge) to sum up my quick post about my personal PGP usage:

This is how transparently decrypted emails look like in Outlook 2007 or Entourage 2008:

Here is the Policy Editor which is available per secured account (different policies for different email accounts):

And finally this is the main user interface:

Hope this helps!