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 PGP: the place to be
March 16, 2005 - Part II
In my situation, after I created a pair of keys, I was hoping to be able to send encrypted emails right away. But that proved to be hard, especially with my Outlook Express and Office-bundled Outlook email clients. Despite what the PGP Desktop manual claims, these two clients were incompatible with the program (or at least were not working properly on the two machines I tested the PGP program on).
I'll elaborate a bit further on this point. After I created my combination of keys, I tried to send a couple of emails from my account to the same account in encrypted form, just to test how the process works. I created the email shown in the screen shot below, highlighted the icon for encryption (penultimate icon on the Outlook Express toolbar), and clicked the Send button.
Outlook Express brought up the following warning window:
I was tenacious and clicked the Yes button. Then the following window appeared:
I interpreted that window as telling me that I couldn't send an encrypted email. That was a bit upsetting, as I had followed every recommendation in the manual and still was unable to accomplish my first-ever sending of an encrypted email. Outlook Express simply didn't recognize that I already had a PGP keypair created and was going to use it in my message. I should've seen a window that prompted me to select the designated recipients of the email I was going to send.
Something similar happened when I tried to do the same thing with my Outlook program, only in that case, the program didn't have any encryption icon in its interface.
After two days of wrangling with the program, trying to dispatch a message in encrypted form by using the PGP plug-in (that is, automatically), I decided to abandon this task and send the message manually encrypted instead. I did that without much effort. I just right-clicked the padlock icon in the Windows notification area, selected Clipboard, and then selected Encrypt & Sign to have the current window's plain text encrypted:
Just be sure to pick the right recipient, and please remember that the subject of a message and its attachments still come out in visible, unencrypted form.
Continue to Part III
Back to Part I
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