Secure Email-Clients with PGP/MIME
PGP [en] is the abbreviation of Pretty Good Privacy. PGP was developed by Philip Zimmermann [en] in 1991 that can be used for encryption & decryption as well as for signing & verification. It has been established as quasi standard for secure communication in the Internet especially email communication. OpenPGP is the more important standard that defines digital signatures, encryption & decryption and key management. OpenPGP is maintained by the OpenPGP Allicance [en] and is available in RFC 2440 [en]. In 1999 Werner Koch [en] released the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) [en|de|fr...] that is compatible to OpenPGP and Open Source and so more secure.
PGP/MIME and PGP/inline are methods that describe how PGP and GnuPG are used within email whereas PGP/MIME has been developed since PGP/inline has caused problems. PGP/MIME was specified in RFC 2015 [en] in 1996 and reworked in RFC 3156 [en] in 2001.
PGP/MIME does have these advantages over the PGP/inline standard:
- attachments (e.g. text-, spreadsheet. PDF documents etc.) are encrypted and signed
- umlauts and non-ASCII-characters can be used
- the PGP-signature is separated from mail body, it is in an attachment. This causes
- more easily reading the email since you will not be impeated by the inline PGP-signature
- more easily responding since the parts of the PGP-signature do not need to be deleted
- less faults since the email text will not be modified by the inserted PGP-signature
At the moment, there are email-clients that do not support the better PGP/MIME method. I have created this list since I have wanted to know how many clients it support at all.
I have asked the authors and users of these email-clients, but could not test all of them and there may be some email-clients that are not listed. I have not listed email-clients that are not being developed anymore. If you use a client that is listed here but does not support PGP/MIME, please upgrade to the latest version.
Using relays you can use any email-client (even Outlook Express).