If you’re worried about government spying on you, or if it is your hawk-eyed company is too interested in your mailbox, or if you’re fed up of targeted advertisements, or if you want to communicate privately with your love interest, or to manage sensitive documents like identity cards, bank statements, passwords— keeping conversations encrypted using PGP is worth doing. What is PGP (Pretty Good Privacy)? I’m not going to go into the nuances of PGP because of complex cryptography used under the hood. Essentially, PGP garbles up the email making it look like random letters and numbers. This encryption happens using sender’s public key. So if you wish to send anyone an email securely, all you need is their public key. It’s a trend these days to put up PGP public key as Twitter bio. https://darkwebnews.com/pgp-guide/ When this message is downloaded on the recipient’s side, it is decrypted using a receiver’s private key. So if anyone is spying on your mailbox, all they’d see is garbled text! Make sure you never ever share your private key with anyone. Step-by-step guide to set up PGP 1. Download and install Mozilla Thunderbird Thunderbird is a free email application that’s easy to set up and customize. Go to and download thunderbird for whichever OS you’re on. https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/all/ This is what my application console looks like — Set up your existing account on thunderbird. This may take up 5 to 10 minutes depending upon how many emails you have. 2. Download and install GNU Privacy guard GnuPG is a complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard as defined by (also known as ). GnuPG allows you to encrypt and sign your data and communications; it features a versatile key management system, along with access modules for all kinds of public key directories. RFC4880 PGP Go to to download it. https://gnupg.org/download/index.html 3. Download Enigmail Enigmail is a simple interface for OpenPGP email security. Go to to download it. https://www.enigmail.net/index.php/en/download To install Enigmail on Thunderbird, use to save the extension locally. Then navigate to the Thunderbird menu Tools > Addons right click “Save Link as …” Choose Enigmail and add it. 4. Get your keys Go to thunderbird and then go to Enigmail/p=p menu > Select Key Management This is your public key. This is what trendy cool people put in their twitter bio. Now let’s test it by sending an email. You encrypt your email using your private key and the receiver will decrypt the mail using your public key (fingerprint). TESTING TIME! I sent the email using thunderbird and opened the email using gmail and this is what I get. I actually wrote: Thunderbird will automatically decrypt the email given that your thunderbird account has sender’s public key (fingerprint). And that’s how it is done!
