If you’ve received an e-mail from me in the past week or so, you may have noticed something extra in the message’s headers: an indication that it was digitally signed with my Pretty Good Privacy key.

As yet, no recipient has asked about that, much less complimented my digital hygiene or sent a reply encrypted with my PGP public key. Which is pretty much what I expected: The last time I had a PGP setup in operation, I had to ask Post readers to send me an encrypted message before I got any.

A few weeks later, my inbox once again featured only un-encrypted e-mail.

Then some fumbled corporate transitions and the switch to OS X left the open-source MacGPG as the most appealing option on my Mac–and a slow and slowing pace of updates left it an increasingly awkward fit. Without ever consciously deciding to give up on e-mail encryption, I gave up.

(I should have felt guiltier than I did when I offered a Post colleague a tutorial on crypto that I didn’t bother to operate on my own machine. On that note, if you have a key for robp@washpost.com or rob@twp.com in your own PGP keychain, please delete it.)

I finally returned to the fold two weeks ago, when I ducked into a “crypto party” tutorial at the Computers, Freedom & Privacy conference. Jon Camfield of Internews explained that things had gotten a lot better and pointed me to a newer, far more elegant open-source implementation called GPGTools. I downloaded it, installed it, and within minutes had a new set of public and private keys plugged into my copy of Mail (no need to copy and paste a message into a separate decryption app as I did in MacGPG), with my public key uploaded to a keyserver for anybody else to use to encrypt mail to me.

My key ID is 03EE085A, my key fingerprint is FD67 6114 46E8 6105 27C3 DD92 673F F960 03EE 085A, and the key itself is after the jump. Do I expect to get a flood of encrypted messages after this post? Not really. But if somebody does want to speak to me with that level of privacy, they now have an option I should have provided all along, and that’s what counts.

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: SKS 1.1.4
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=eWkR
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----