My hovercraft is full of eels

If you've ever needed (perhaps need is too strong a word, how about wanted) to digitally sign—or encrypt for that matter—your emails from within the Mac Mail client, it's pretty simple. Even though there are plenty of mail applications that support PGP, I've grown fond of Mail.app so this morning—for no real good reason—I installed a few plugins, etc. and was up and running in literally 5 mins (ok 10 mins—I didn't have a clue what kind of signature I should use).

First go and get GPGMail. The download is a .DMG file and the instructions on the web site are easy to follow. In addition to GPGMail, you'll also need GNU PG for the Mac (GPGMac and GPG Keychain Access as a minimum).

I also found I needed to go into the Preferences>PGP>Composing and switch on "By default, use OpenPGP/MIME". This allows signed messages to be sent using MIME rather than the old-school format which surrounds the text in the signature and makes it look as though your email was sent through some kind of full-on nerdifier—a bit scary for mum.

Now that I have the ability to sign emails I'll just, well, probably never use it really—quite frankly, I can't imagine anyone being bothered to impersonate me in an email—but at least I feel "safer" LOL.

So anyway, here is my PGP key (valid until August 22, 2006) for anyone who cares:

Key ID: 0xD56C95B07EA87B26
Key Type: RSA
Expires: 2006-08-23
Key Size: 2048
Fingerprint: AF94 4D3E F229 1A40 4F79 17DD D56C 95B0 7EA8 7B26
UserID: Simon Harris <simon@redhillconsulting.com.au>

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (Darwin)
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=2DOr
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

Of course it occurs to me that someone could also spoof my blog and change the public key here but again, I'm thinking people have better things to waste their valuable time on like say, RAD for example ;-).