On Mar 3, 2014, at 4:06 PM, Daniel Mickelsen wrote:

> I've never been able to understand how this works. What are the keys doing?

Everyone who uses encrypted mail gets two keys: a public key and a private key. 
A message encrypted with one of the keys can only be decrypted with the other. 
You make one key public so people can use it to send you encrypted mail. The 
other key is kept private and is used to decrypt the mail.

The keys really are nothing more than really large numbers. Some mathematical 
trickery is involved in the encryption/decryption, but you don’t  really need 
to know anything about that.

Apple mail has had this capability for many years. You can get keys for free 
from several places.



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