Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is a way to help protect your email communications from being read by anyone except their intended recipients. You will first download all the software needed, install it, and then end with configuration and how to use the result. What using Mozilla Thunderbird with the Enigmail add-on gives you is an easy way to encrypt the body of your email. For similar reasons, PGP does not encrypt the subject line of your emails so you may want to use a generic subject line when sending encrypted emails. Encrypting the sender and receiver information would break email. Using PGP doesn't completely encrypt all aspects of your email: the sender and receiver information is unencrypted. We have still not found a satisfactory solution for these other programs. You can choose either to install Thunderbird and experiment with PGP with a new email client, or you can investigate other solutions to use PGP with your customary software. This guide won't tell you how to use PGP with these programs. You may have your own favorite email software program (or use a web mail service like Gmail or ). What this guide teaches is how to use PGP with Mozilla Thunderbird, an email client program that performs a similar function to Outlook. GnuPG is the program that actually encrypts and decrypts the content of your mail, Mozilla Thunderbird is an email client that allows you to read and write emails without using a browser, and Enigmail is an add-on to Mozilla Thunderbird that ties it all together.

To use PGP to exchange secure emails you have to bring together three programs: GnuPG, Mozilla Thunderbird and Enigmail. If you would like to use PGP via GnuPG, or Thunderbird with Enigmail, please refer to those services’ websites and documentation for information on how to install and use them.

NOTE: This guide is not being actively reviewed or updated, and is currently retired.

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