GPG Mail is a
commercial extension for
Apple Mail which comes as part of
GPG Suite, a software collection that provides easy access to a collection of tools designed to secure your communications and encrypt files. GPG Mail provides
public key email encryption and signing. It integrates with the default email client
Apple Mail under
macOS and the actual
cryptographic
Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or '' -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adve ...
functionality is handled by
GNU Privacy Guard
GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG) is a free-software replacement for Symantec's PGP cryptographic software suite. The software is compliant with RFC 4880, the IETF standards-track specification of OpenPGP. Modern versions of PGP are interoperable ...
.
GPG Mail was first released on February 7, 2001, by Stéphane Corthésy. Since 2010 GPG Mail is maintained by GPGTools. While GNU Privacy Guard is
free
Free may refer to:
Concept
* Freedom, having the ability to do something, without having to obey anyone/anything
* Freethought, a position that beliefs should be formed only on the basis of logic, reason, and empiricism
* Emancipate, to procur ...
open-source software, use of GPG Mail requires purchase of a support plan.
On September 21, 2018, the developer introduced GPG Mail 3.0 as a part of GPG Suite 2018.4, a new software release that included support for
macOS Mojave. In this release, the developer removed the
free license
A free license or open license is a license which allows others to reuse another creator’s work as they wish. Without a special license, these uses are normally prohibited by copyright, patent or commercial license. Most free licenses are wo ...
option for GPG Mail. A lot of users that relied on automated upgrades were caught by surprise, which prompted a significant backlash from the community. While the licensing change was identified in the release notes for GPG Suite 2018.4, many believed that such a big change required more prominent notifications to avoid the perception of "bait and switch".
In August 2019 the default key server was switched to hagrid, a new verifying key server located at keys.openpgp.org. This improved the quality of search results for public keys and increased control for users over their public keys stored on the server.
On November 24, 2020, GPG Mail 5 was introduced,
supporting
macOS Mojave,
macOS Catalina and
macOS Big Sur.
See also
*
Email encryption
*
OpenPGP
*
End-to-end encryption
*
Cryptography
References
{{Reflist
External links
GPGTools website
Cryptographic software
OpenPGP
MacOS security software