Encrypting and Signing e-mails

Very often you have confidential information that you want to tell somebody else by e-mail. Therefore you want to use encryption and signatures. You may use GnuPG directly to encrypt and sign your letter and send this document as attachment to your party. But there's software that helps you doing this automatically, so you won't have to bother about calling GnuPG yourself.

For e-mails, it's the job of the mail reader (MUA = Mail User Agent) to provide this help.⁴

The Mail program mutt does provide excellent support for PGP and GPG. It has a lot of other nice features like mail threading and it is therefore the prefered MUA of a lot of people. The interaction between mutt and gpg will be described below. Other program with gpg support include pine (limited), Gnus and others.