KDE and Gnome Email Clients (6) K Mail and PGP
PGP makes your email secure. Find out how easy it is to use it with K Mail.
PGP
Email is a rather insecure way of transporting information. Virtually anybody can read the contents of your messages. Probably the only way to prohibit this is to encrypt your email.
PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) has always been a popular choice for public key encryption. K Mail works fine with PGP. I tried a combination of K Mail and PGP 5 on a Linux machine.
Setting up PGP to Work with K Mail
Probably the only set-up you need to do is tell K Mail your PGP identity. Do this on the PGP tab of the "Settings" dialog. My user identity is "0x3D8270DE", for example.
It's better not to store your pass-phrase anywhere, not in K Mail either. It is probably a good idea to have any encrypted message you send be encrypted to yourself, too; this way you can decrypt it with your private key and read it.
Writing Signed Mail
If you sign a message with PGP, the recipient can be sure it was you who wrote it.
To send a signed message in K Mail, you create a new message as we did last week and make sure the "sign message" icon (the one with the feather) is pressed. As far as I know, this is the only way to tell K Mail to use PGP to sing a message.
As soon as you send the message, K Mail asks for the pass-phrase to your secret key. The rest is done by K Mail and PGP.
Reading Signed Mail
When K Mail detects a PGP signature in a message, it automatically tries to verify that signature.
If the key the message was signed with is not present in your public key ring, K Mail will tell you that the message was signed, but it cannot identify the key; K Mail displays the key ID instead.
Writing Encrypted Mail
To have a message encrypted, all you need to do is press the "encrypt message" icon (the one with the red key) in the message composer window.
K Mail will look for the recipient or recipients and make PGP encrypt the message for these email addresses. If there is no public key for the recipient available in your key ring, K Mail will not encrypt the message.
When you spool the message for sending, K Mail will send the message through PGP to encrypt it for the recipients (and for yourself, if you selected "always encrypt to self").
Reading Encrypted Mail
If you open a message K Mail identifies to be encrypted, K Mail will automatically decrypt it for you. To do so, it asks you for the pass-phrase to your secret key.
If everything works fine, the encrypted message is displayed just like any other message and you are ready to read it, reply to it, forward it, archive it, print it, love it, or trash it.
If you enter no or the wrong pass-phrase, K Mail shows the message in its encrypted form. This is interesting, but at the same time isn't.
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