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Where is PGP except that expensive commercial client which tries to do too much?

I shouldn't have to google things like this for you.

Apple has PGP keys that you can use for submitting encrypted email to them; they tell you to use it for sending in proof of security issues. While they don't include the functionality in Mail, there's always MacGPG (command-line tools, plus a nice Aqua-fied port) and the GPGMail plugin.

Why Apple and Mozilla make no official inclusion, I have no idea. Probably due to licensing, no doubt. (It goes without saying that Microsoft doesn't include it because they're Microsoft.)

Apple has PGP keys that you can use for submitting encrypted email to them; they tell you to use it for sending in proof of security issues. While they don't include the functionality in Mail, there's always MacGPG (command-line tools, plus a nice Aqua-fied port) and the GPGMail plugin.

Why Apple and Mozilla make no official inclusion, I have no idea. Probably due to licensing, no doubt. (It goes without saying that Microsoft doesn't include it because they're Microsoft.)

Thanks for the Verisign links, they were (frighteningly) informative.
I guess I'll wait until the GPGMail plugin is Leopard compatible. I was pretty impressed with Mail.app otherwise, but perhaps I'll just have to go back to old "reliable" Thunderbird, its Enigmail extension seems well-regarded.

"Whoever recommended you use S/MIME instead of GPG, probably considered security to be a very, very distant second priority"

I guess you must be right... but I wondered as I was reading such guides... what other priorities could there be?

I have the capability of using both S/MIME and GPG for email (using Apple Mail, it's a matter of installing gpg, getting the Sente Software gpg addon for Mail, and getting a S/MIME certificate to activate the built-in S/MIME support), but overall I think S/MIME is probably better positioned to succeed in the marketplace. It's more idiotproof.

As much as I really despise the centralized philosophy behind S/MIME and x.509, there's something to be said for avoiding the 'web of trust' models that lie underneath GPG as its currently used, because most users just don't want to have to deal with it.

Getting people to use encryption is always a tough sell, because most people, to be perfectly frank, lead lives that are so completely boring that nobody would ever want to read their mail, and they know it. Therefore, they're not going to expend much effort getting it working. Either it works all automagically, or they don't use it at all.

I've yet to see a GPG implementation that comes as close to being foolproof as some S/MIME implementations (like Apple's), once you get the certificates set up. Once you've received a signed message from someone, you have their public key. Once you have that, the encryption button is magically enabled, and you can send encrypted stuff to them. Even Sente's Mail frontend to GPG isn't that easy to use.

Just a small correction. The Mail client for OS X (aka "Apple Mail" or whatever you want to call it) doesn't have PGP capabilities built in.

It has some S/MIME capabilities built in (and almost totally undocumented, as far as I can tell, and it's a bit of a bear to set up), but to get anything related to PGP, you need to install the excellent set of plugins from Sente, called GPGMail. It is basically an interface between Apple Mail, and the CLI gpg tools.

It relies on some undocumented and unsupported APIs in Mail, so it could (and has, in the past) broken whenever Apple decides to change anything.

I've always thought it was too bad that Apple didn't actually provide some real PGP support in Mail; if they just bought GPGMail and built it in, it would be a nice start, and one less step I'd have to walk my friends through. My suspicion is that it's not built in, because at Apple HQ they use S/MIME and are happy with that, thus there's no motivation to include PGP features. The only reference I've ever seen by Apple to PGP is on their Product Security page, where they publish a public key that they use to sign official security-related documents.

(Incidentally, Apple's iChat also has encryption support. But again, sadly, it's not using the very nice, open source OTR system, it's done using an Apple plugin only good for talking to other iChat users. I think this also was something developed for internal use that they decided to release to the public, and since they have something that works for them internally, there's little chance of them ever implementing OTR.)

Another Mail add-on would be to integrate PGP/GPG in a seamless, easy to use manner so that everyone and their grandma could use it, perhaps by default.

Check out GPGMail. It works seamlessly and really quite well - we use this at the office all the time.

Now a real killer app would be something to make the PGP infrastructure key management, authentication and authorization as easy as it is with X.509 (GPG Keychain Access is a start, but not a solution). Then people could use it by default, and we could start marking all non-signed (and some signed) mail automatically as spam.

If you have a Mac, the board to get is, hands down, GoBan.

For the Apple Mac OS X

GPGMail plugin for Apple Computer's Mail.app works wonderfully. Using GnuPG from DarwinPorts/OpenDarwin or following the binary download from www.gnupg.org, there will be a .dmg for the Mac that has an installable .pkg in the disk image. This is the simplest way to do encryption with the mac. There are some GnuPG front ends available for the Mac from www.gnupg.org which are helpful in generating keys, importing public keys etc etc.

The only hitch with using GPGMail with the DarwinPorts version of GnuPG is, GPGMail expects the gpg binary to be in /usr/loca/bin and it's hard-coded. This is normal and good, but DarwinPorts places it in /opt/local/bin. The work around is creating a symlink: "ln -s /opt/local/bin/gpg /usr/local/bin/gpg" w/o the quotes.

For Windows.

A user already mentioned WinPT before and there are many posts already mentioning Enigmail with Thunderbird. There is also a GnuPG plugin (here too)for OutLook Express.

Those are just two, other options will come up from other people

kybred

No, you don't

Quit Mail
In Finder, rename folder $HOME/Library/Mail/Bundles (Disabled) back to $HOME/Library/Mail/Bundles.
In Terminal, type:
defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1
defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 2
Relaunch Mail

plz go to the gpgmail homepage http://www.sente.ch/software/GPGMail/English.lproj /GPGMail.html
or just do this:
(from homepage)
GPGMail & 10.4.1
MacOS X 10.4.1 will automatically disable all Mail bundles when encountering them the first time. To re-enable GPGMail (which works fine with 10.4.1), you need to:

* Quit Mail
* In Finder, rename folder $HOME/Library/Mail/Bundles (Disabled) back to $HOME/Library/Mail/Bundles.
* In Terminal, type:

defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1
defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 2

* Relaunch Mail

Actually, pac-man and other like games are still fun, it simply depends on the player. I only discovered pac-man about a year ago(wasn't around for the original...) and it's probably the game I play the most, the first being GNU Go. Most people now days don't appreciate simple game play.
Links:[pac the man] [GoBan]

Learn how to cryptographically sign your mail on Mac OS X 10.3

Or you could simply download/install GPGMail and not worry about all that silly cert stuff.

You DO have a GPG key allready, right?

I have two in my Apple Mail client -- one for GPGMail and another for reporting spam to spamcop.net.

do you really think they , mac users , will accustom them to m4 , groff , epn etc or anything built upon them?

• Texshop is a wrapper around Latex.
• cocoaspell is a wrapper around the Unix spell checker aspell
• GPG Mail is a wrapper around the Gnu PGP implementation so that Mail.app can handle PGP.

The intersting thing is that the service menu is something very Unixish, many command line utilities would make good services. For those that don't know OS X, services are components that take the current selection and apply some treatement on them. There are services that search google, do text transformation, ec...

Sen:te has put together something that works seamlessly and automaticaly w. OS X's Mail.

But you are right - the lack of Linux (or Mac) support is not what has kept secure email from becoming more wide-spread.

The Junk mail filter is apparently a heuristic filter that will learn as you give it feedback. I have it turned on in "training mode" right now; there is a "Junk" icon to flag junk mail; it turns to "Not Junk" if you want to de-flag some mail. When you put it into automatic mode it creates a "Junk" folder that you can then set to automatically empty after a certain period of time.

Other filters (Mail.app calls them "rules") are more capable; you can AND/OR (match "any" or "all") the rules before applying an action.

Unfortunately, the SpamCop mailbundle for MacOS X Mail.app is broken with the new version of Mail. So is GPGMail, but there is a beta version already available for download.

The mailboxes "drawer" on the right has changed its look a little bit, which I had to mentally adjust-for. Most irritatingly, I was only able to see my IMAP folders by enabling my .Mac email (it just forwards to my IMAP account anyway). It was a little clunky/inconsistent with things like "On My Mac" appearing/disappearing, but eventually I got the look of it stabilized.

Mac OS X version of GNU Go is distributed by Sente Software.

It works pretty good on my iBook 500. Supposedly computer Go players arent' all that good, but I'm worse, so it kicks my ass all the time.

More sublime then Circle of Iron: Go here.

You can also go to emulation.net and pick up some emulation software of your choice. You'll have to be willing to break copyright law to get the ROMs, though.

BlackGriffen

The program Goban is a Go client for OS X with GnuGo 3.2 packaged into it. It now also supports two internet Go servers, IGS and NNGS, so you can play against more than just the computer.

There's also a GPG plugin for Apple's Mail.app. It's a bit limited, but it's free (as in speech) and an active project. Additionally, there's GNUMail a clone of Mail.app with better, built-in GPG support

I've read on numerous occasions that NA has versions of PGP updated to run on OS X and XP, but aren't releasing them. Something to do with 9/11 maybe? It seems stupid to simply throw away a defacto standard.

Let's hope the geeks here make that problem irrelevant. So far the Mac side is doing *OK* with tools like GPG Tools, GPGMail, and Apple's own AES encrypted volumes using Disk Copy. However, syncing with key servers, file wiping and other functionality available in PGPFreeware is sorely missed. Maybe Phil Z should start a company focused on GPG rather than wasting his energy trying to get PGP open sourced...

I use GPGMail, which is a plugin for OSX's Mail.app.

All it requires is that you have gpg installed, which compiles cleanly. I use it every single day, and it works fine... it could do with a few more features, but it is easy to use, even for newbies, once they've had the basic principles of PGP explained to them....

I'm one of those many recent OS X converts who just bought my first Mac, after years of having used Unix and Windows.

PGP is something I've played with over the years, like a lot of geeks, but never used religiously. But I decided a few months ago that it was something I should start using regularly, so I sought out a mail client with built-in PGP (or variant) support. I found a neat little (non-free) Windows e-mail client called The Bat! (that's their exclamation point, not mine), which had not only built-in support, but you can configure it to use PGP, GnuPG, and even their own OpenPGP implementation. That and many other cool features persuaded me to buy that e-mail client, after which time I decided to throw the switch and begin signing all e-mail that I send.

Along the way I discovered WinPT (Windows Privacy Tray), which is a decent little frontend for GPG. Remember, GPG is a backend -- how you interface with it is up to you.

The came my Titanium PowerBook. I got it for all the reasons mentioned around Slashdot and elsewhere, but I didn't really expect to find cool things like a good GPG frontend, let alone e-mail with GPG support. Boy was I wrong! I went to the GPG site and found a link to the Mac GPG site, which ports GPG to OS X. Not only the backend, but a frontend that integrates with the "Finder" (that's Mac-speak for the "Explorer" equivalent), right in the "Services" menu (which is much like the global right-click menu in Windows Exploror.

But that's not all! I saw further down on the same page that somebody else has written an extension to the OS X default mail client (which ain't as bad as you might think) that provides very good GUI GPG support for mail.

So, even though switching over to the Mac isn't the easiest thing in the world (I say that as I sit here typing on my Windows machine for reasons I won't go into), I can say that GPG is among the least of my problems.

RP

For those wondering about Mac OS X solutions for secure email, refer to: GPGMail and Secure Mail Reading on Mac OS X

> Give me the source to Mail.app, so I can add
> support for certificates. It's not like your
> competition is going to steal anything useful out
> of that excellent, Cocoa-centric app.

Are you sure you even need the source? Yes, it'd be cool, but the folks at GPGMail managed to add GnuPG support to it without any source code.

First, some kudos to the GnuPG team. I think this is one example of free software really taking over a given market. I only know of one person who uses the commercial version of PGP, and that's because his job requires it. Everyone else I know uses GPG.

Now:

For those of you lucky enough to be using MacOS X (go ahead a flame me - I've been using Unix for ten years, and MacOS X rox my sox), just grab a copy of GnuPG from Fink and install GnuPG.

After that, grab a copy of PGPMail from Sente, and use the easy, one-drag install. It's still in beta, but it's damn nice integration.

For reference, I'm running MacOS X 10.1.3. When I send an email to someone whose public key is in my keyring, I just click the button "Encrypt" before I click send. Voila. When I receive something encrypted, I have the option of having it automatically decrypt, or I just click "decrypt" in the toolbar. Very nice.