Webmonkey has published the introductory chapter to PGP & GPG: Email for the Practical Paranoid by Michael W. Lucas.

It covers Phil Zimmermann’s first steps with PGP, the lawsuits with the US Government, the launch of OpenPGP, GnuPG, legal aspects of encryption and more.

A brief quotation:

The ideas behind PGP had been known and understood by computer scientists and mathematicians for years, so the underlying concepts weren’t truly innovative. Zimmermann’s real innovation was in making these tools usable by anyone with a home computer. Even early versions of PGP gave people with standard DOS-based home computers access to military-grade encryption.

UPDATE: Mirko posts a link in the comments to an audio interview with Jon Callas , CTO at PGP Corporation, who also explains the history of PGP. Thanks.pgp, gpg, encryption, privacy, Zimmermann, OpenPGP, GnuPG, history

Hot on the heels of Matt Haughey’s fine post about the difficulties of using encryption in Mail.app, comes an update to GPGMail.

This plugin is a front end for gpg and allows you to send and receive encrypted messages. It extends Mail.app’s in-built encryption features in several useful ways.

You can read about the features it offers and its limitation on the GPGMail site.

The new version fixes a compatibility problem with MailTags, needs GPG 1.4 or better, works better in Panther, has a Dutch localisation, works better with AppleScript-generated windows and solves a number of other bugs. (Full changelog ).

The developer warns, “GPGMail is a complete hack, relying on Mail’s private internal API. Use it at your own risks!” But don’t let that put you off.

Get it from the GPGMail web site. encryption, PGP, GPG, plugin, mail.app, apple mail, mailtags, applescript, certificates

John Tangney tells the story of a possible plugin conflict between GrowlMail and PGP 8.x in Apple Mail and how he fixed it.

Over the weekend a German Mail.app user posted a very odd problem in the forums at MacUser.de.

After trying out Apple Mail for the first time, he found that he could send and receive mail OK, but he couldn’t type anything in the message field of a new email.

Not only that, his Compose window looked quite unusual, with a severely truncated Account selection drop-down menu:

Numerous suggestions were made — Had he entered his account details properly, entered an SMTP server, repaired Permissions, deleted his account and re-entered the details, entered his username properly? — all to no avail.

Finally, running the 10.4.2 Combo update fixed the problem.

The cause? An incompatible version of PGP (Version 8). Perhaps.

The moral? Disabling third-party software or add-ons is a good trouble-shooting step. Always.

GPGMail is a plug-in that enables the sending and receiving of encrypted emails in Apple Mail. It works in Tiger and Panther, and acts as a front-end to macgpg, the Mac port of an open source encryption engine, gpg. You will need to install macgpg first.

After installing GPGMail, you will find a new sub-menu under the Message menu, from which you can manage your digital signatures and other encryption options. The developer’s website provides a list of the plug-in’s limitations, including the fact that encrypted messages are just stored by Apple Mail and not indexed.

It is freeware and is available from the developer’s website.

Joar Winfors provides some background on his site about using digital signatures in Apple Mail.

UPDATE: GPGMail 1.1.2 released, 5 February 2006.

UPDATE: 25 July 2011 The GPGTools web site now hosts this plug-in.