Here is a list of steps to send a signed e-mail: http://davidjarvis.ca/dave/tech/privacy.shtml http://davidjarvis.ca/dave/tech/privacy.shtml Once signing is i

Here is a list of steps to send a signed e-mail: http://davidjarvis.ca/dave/tech/privacy.shtml http://davidjarvis.ca/dave/tech/privacy.shtml Once signing is in place, you can send an encrypted e-mail: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/digitally-signing-and-encrypting-messages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/digitally-signing-and-e... Here's the response from Robert Hansen on why Enigmail has such a complicated process: > Here's the heart of the problem: "Modifying the wizard to account for average users" works only if you can define an 'average user'. And you can't, the same way that I can't. Please don't misunderstand me, it's not my intent to slight you or your willingness to do a lot of hard work. (Quite the opposite: I really hope you're willing to do it!) But we have to start by looking at the realities, and the reality is the the GnuPG-using community is incredibly fractious and prone to declaring holy wars over the most trivial and irrelevant of details. > If you set key generation to default to 4096-bit keys, a lot of people will roll their eyes and accuse you of subscribing to key length fetishism. If you leave the default at GnuPG's default of 2048-bit keys, a lot of people will scream that you're not providing enough security. > If you default to inline PGP, international users and people who love HTML mail will complain the default doesn't work for them. If you default to PGP/MIME, people who post to mailing lists will scream that your change just broke their communications. (Not a joke, incidentally: there are a lot of mailing lists that strip all attachments as a security measure... which has the side effect of completely breaking PGP/MIME.) > The reason why we ask so many questions in the wizard is not because we're afraid of losing existing users, although that would definitely be a consequence if we were to go with your more simplified way. The reason why we ask so many questions is because we cannot know which option a user will demand to use and will think should be enabled by default. > If we can't come up with a default that will work just fine out-of-the-box for 95% of our userbase, then we're not going to make it a default. We'll ask the user for their preference. And that's the reason why our wizard asks so many questions: we ask questions when there is no clearly correct default. I think he's wrong. Flexible software would have a default wizard for basic users and an advanced wizard for users who care about the difference between 2048- and 4096-bit keys. It's one question at the start of the install process, "Would you like to tweak encryption settings?" -- Yes, No, and "What does tweak mean?" are possible answers. Or install with default settings and guide power users to tweak the parameters post-install. Encrypted e-mail should not require over 90 steps.