The other day I was booking a hotel room and wanted to tell them my credit card information over the phone. Their response was that they don’t take it over the phone because it’s not secure enough and that I should send it in an email instead. Sending credit card information in an unencrypted email is secure? Guess again.

Anyway… This got me thinking about email encryption and how it used to be a pain to get working several years ago. Surely something must have happened since then and it would be easy now, right? Right – it actually is! It takes 5 mins to set up and is completely free!

On the Mac, just get the GPGTools Installer and follow their short tutorial. Within 5 mins you have a key and are ready to go and send signed and encrypted emails from within Apple Mail!

But what do I do on the iPhone/iPad? Encrypted messages only show up empty with a weird attachment! – Well, install the free oPenGP Lite app to do the encrypting/decrypting for you!

Export all your keys from  GPG Keychain Access (part of the GPGTools, you used this to create your key), add the resulting file to the oPenGP Lite app via iTunes File Sharing or Dropbox (They say supporting key servers is on their roadmap, but I guess you’ll always have to add at least your secret key). Now you can decrypt by opening the mail attachment in oPenGP Lite or encrypt directly in oPenGP by writing a message and choosing Send by mail! Not as nice as as having it right in the Mail app, but better than not having it at all!

You may now securely share your secrets with me!

Edit: Here’s someone else’s post about the new GPGMail 2 (it should work the same and has the same info as in the tutorial, but it’s *new*!)