GPG Mail is a

commercial Commercial may refer to: * (adjective for) commerce, a system of voluntary exchange of products and services ** (adjective for) trade, the trading of something of economic value such as goods, services, information or money * a dose of advertising ...

extension for

Apple Mail Mail, also known as Apple Mail, is an email client included by Apple Inc. with its operating systems macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and visionOS. Mail grew out of NeXTMail, which was originally developed by NeXT as part of its NeXTSTEP operating ...

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 Public-key cryptography, or asymmetric cryptography, is the field of cryptographic systems that use pairs of related keys. Each key pair consists of a public key and a corresponding private key. Key pairs are generated with cryptographic alg ...

email encryption Email encryption is encryption of email messages to protect the content from being read by entities other than the intended recipients. Email encryption may also include authentication. Email is prone to the disclosure of information. Although man ...

and signing. It integrates with the default email client

under

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

and the actual

cryptographic Cryptography, or cryptology (from "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or '' -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More gen ...

functionality is handled by

GNU Privacy Guard GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG) is a free-software replacement for Symantec's cryptographic software suite PGP. The software is compliant with the now obsoleted , the IETF standards-track specification of OpenPGP. Modern versions of PGP are ...

. 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, the ability to act or change without constraint or restriction * Emancipate, attaining civil and political rights or equality * Free (''gratis''), free of charge * Gratis versus libre, the difference betw ...

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

, 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 macOS Mojave ( ; version 10.14) is the fifteenth major release of macOS, Apple Inc.'s desktop operating system for Macintosh computers. Mojave was announced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference on June 4, 2018, and was released to the ...

. In this release, the developer removed the

free license A free license or open license is a license that allows copyrighted work to be reused, modified, and redistributed. These uses are normally prohibited by copyright, patent or other Intellectual property (IP) laws. The term broadly covers '' fr ...

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 Catalina macOS Catalina (version 10.15) is the sixteenth software versioning, major release of macOS, Apple Inc.'s desktop operating system for Macintosh computers. It is the successor to macOS Mojave and was announced at WWDC 2019 on June 3, 2019 and ...

and

macOS Big Sur macOS Big Sur (version 11) is the seventeenth software versioning, major release of macOS, Apple Inc., Apple's operating system for Macintosh computers. It was announced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 22, 2020, and w ...

. On September 16, 2024, a beta version with support for

macOS Sequoia macOS Sequoia (version 15) is the twenty-first and current major release of Apple Inc., Apple's macOS operating system, the successor to macOS Sonoma. It was announced at Worldwide Developers Conference#2024, WWDC 2024 on June 10, 2024. In li ...

was released.

References

{{Reflist

External links

GPGTools website
Cryptographic software OpenPGP MacOS security software

See also

References

External links