What you’ll need:

• Firefox
• GnuPG already installed
• GMail account
• FireGPG plugin for Firefox

All of these are free of course!

Read ChuckCaplan’s How To if you do not already have GnuPG installed.

FireGPG gives you button-click support for encryption, decryption, and digital signing from GMail’s web site. Now all of you who use web based email can have the benefits of secure, private email without being tied to a service such as Hushmail.

FireGPG can work with any text window, so theoretically it could work with any web based mail account. However, it has built in functionality for GMail that adds buttons to the GMail interface, and it’s probably too much effort to use it with other web mail services until they’re likewise supported.

On the bright side they apparently are working on that support, so perhaps they’ll have a similar user-friendly approach to both Hotmail and Yahoo at some point down the road.

There is a much easier way to generate your public and private keys with GnuPG. If you have the Thunderbird email program installed you can use Thunderbird’s Enigmail plugin to create those keys or to import existing PGP keys.

EDIT: I updated the URL and changed the name from FirePGP to FireGPG. Also, watch this video provided by biotele for further information.

~Steph

Technorati Tags: GMail, Firefox, secure email, encryption, email encryption, privacy