Not a lot many people are familiar with encrypting an email, mostly because it sounds a little more techie.

GPG is GNU Privacy Guard that does email encryption for Windows OS. This software is a complete replacement for PGP (Pretty Good Privacy).

Installation:

Download GPG4Win and follow the procedures to install it in your machine. The application sits on your Windows Start menu. You can access it and generate a key pair. You will use this key pair to encrypt your electronic mail. The picture below shows the example of an email message that I encrypted.

How does it work:

You create a private key and a public key. The public key is published for everyone. But you keep your private key secret. And you can encrypt all your email messages either with your public or private key depending on your purpose of encryption. If you just want to ensure integrity you encrypt the message using a public key and the receiver will decrypt it using his/her private key. And if you want to authenticate your message, then you go with the private key and the receiver decrypts it using your public key ensuring that the message did come from you. GNU Privacy Guard HandBook can walk you through the process of encrypting your messages.

Features:

·         Better functionality than PGP

·         Supports a number of encryption algorithms such as DSA, RSA, AES, triple DES, Blowfish, Twofish, SHA-1, MD-5

·         Supports key and signature expiration dates

·         Easy implementation of new algorithms

Conclusion:

GnuPG or GPG is a freeware that allows encrypting and signing your data. It’s used for email and file encryption. It is a command line tool that features easy integration with other applications. This is really a great piece of software to work with.