What is OpenPGP If you are reading this blog, there is little reason that you shouldn’t be encrypting your personal email with OpenPGP based encryption every time. This series of blog posts will attempt to explain what OpenPGP is, and why and how you should use it. OpenPGP is a IETF standard format, RFC 4880 [0], for providing encryption and digital signatures for any content. OpenPGP is quite flexible, and, although it is used most commonly with E-mail, OpenPGP can be used anywhere that text or files can be exchanged. OpenPGP compliant programs turn data into an ASCII or Binary data that can be copy/paste into files, or put in files directly. GPG [1], The GNU Privacy Guard, is a FOSS implementation of OpenPGP. This is somewhat ironic, because the original PGP code written by Zimmerman was open source, but not libre. Over the years, the code has been extended and owned by a variety of actors - This is perhaps the best example of how open source != libre. This is