I’ve been putting off using encrypted email for a while. The original impetus was the revelation that NSA has managed to cheat Gmail’s SSL communications by intercepting (unencrypted) data flowing between Google datacenters. That’s nice.

Well, no more. From now on, both my email accounts (the one hosted by DreamHost, and the one provided by Caltech) are protected by The GNU Privacy Guard. (Cue dramatic music.) Head over to my contact page for my OpenPGP Key ID and my PGP public key.

I switched from Microsoft Outlook (why was I using Outlook at all?) to Mozilla Thunderbird with the Enigmail add-on to handle OpenPGP signing and encryption. One downside is that people I’m emailing need to implement OpenPGP, as well. And right now, the only contact in my list who does so is the friendly OpenPGP email robot, Adele.