Law & Society Blog

Ever since PGP went commercial, I have not been feeling quite right about the program, and so I switched to GnuPG a while ago. GnuPG is, of course, a wonderful program. Unfortunately, MacOS X 10.4.1 caused all sorts of problems with GPGMail, one of the most useful hacks that integrates GnuPG into Apple’s mail.app. For those who haven’t been using GnuPG, here is how to install it and make it play nice with mail.app. (More information here.) First, install GPG for OS X (current version 1.4.1), then GPG Keychain Access (current version 0.7.0), and finally GPG Preferences (current version 1.2). That gives you the PGP engine along with two intuitive front-ends. Then download and install GPGMail. The next time mail.app is run, it will complain about the GPG bundle and disable it. Quit mail.app, then rename the folder $HOME/Library/Mail/Bundles (Disabled) back to $HOME/Library/Mail/Bundles. (The $HOME folder is the one with the little house, that is, a user home folder, not the root.) Open terminal.app and type:

defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1
defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 2
exit

Then relaunch mail.app, and GPG should work just fine!