On 1/30/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Gordon Messmer</b> <<a href="mailto:yinyang@eburg.com">yinyang@eburg.com</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Arthur Pemberton wrote:<br><br>><br>> Could someone briefly fill me in on the if, why and how of email<br>> signing (I do not mean signatures). I am sure I can google the how,<br>> but I would like opions and experiences.
<br><br><br>OK, I presume that you mean cryptographic signing. Message signing can<br>be done with either SMIME or PGP. Both accomplish the same thing, and<br>operate in virtually the same way.<br><br>Why sign? It's all about trust. If you reliably sign your messages,
<br>the people with whom you exchange messages can configure their mail<br>client to trust the fingerprint of your certificate (or, they may trust<br>someone who signed your certificate). They can trust that a message<br>
with your name on it, which has a valid signature, was written by you<br>and has not been tampered with. They should also learn not to trust<br>messages that have your name on it, but no signature.<br><br>Which method you choose probably will be influenced most by who,
<br>exactly, you want to be able to verify your signatures. SMIME uses, in<br>large part, the same infrastructure that is already in virtually every<br>mail client to support SSL connections. That's one of the reasons that
<br>SMIME is supported by nearly every major mail client available, out of<br>the box. PGP does pretty much exactly the same thing, but requires an<br>entirely separate infrastructure. I'm not aware of any major client<br>
that supports PGP by default; they require plugins, mostly. That gives<br>SMIME a significant advantage if you want to sign messages, and have<br>that information be useful to a wide audience.<br></blockquote></div><br>
A follow up question which I haven't yet understood from
Googling, what happens when my GPG signed email gets sent to my
prof. who used Outlook?<br>-- <br>As a boy I jumped through Windows, as a man I play with Penguins.