Hello Cristina, On Tue, 28 Sep 2004 you wrote in <mid:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
CR> Could you step by step it, please? Have a read of this for starters and I suggest joining pgp-users newsgroup too, very friendly and that's where I learnt how to work it. This might help to direct your learning a bit - bottom line is that you are going to have to do quite a bit of reading to get your head around all the things that make PGP work. I will also try to answer your question about file and folder encryption, because I'd like to help and because a lot of people who are new to PGP ask that and other newbies might like a simple explanation too. I suggest that you start by reading the first chapter of "Introduction to Cryptography", which you can see in HTML format here (http://www.pgpi.org/doc/pgpintro/). I don't think you should limit yourself to this chapter, but it will give you a pretty good overview. When you have digested it a bit, I'd suggest you read the rest of the document, which you have to get as a PDF file - you can download a copy here (ftp://ftp.pgpi.org/pub/pgp/6.5/docs/english/IntroToCrypto.pdf) There a loads of resources on the net to help you understand a bit more about how PGP works and why it is used. To start with, it will seem rather a large subject, so don't worry if you can't figure out how to use all of the different elements at the beginning. I particularly like Tom McCune's PGP page (http://www.mccune.cc/PGP.htm), which has more information about PGP than I can possible find time to write about here. You might also like to take a look at Patrick Feisthammel's page explaining the web of trust (http://www.rubin.ch/pgp/weboftrust.en.html)- I think it is quite helpful. These are by no means the only places to look and I am sure others will want to make their own suggestions to help you out... Personally, I think it is important that all PGP users have a bit of knowledge about Phil Zimmermann, creator of PGP, to whom we all owe a great deal. You can read about Phil all over the Internet but if you want it from the horse's mouth, go here: http://www.philzimmermann.com The other thing you need to know is that there are several versions of PGP - some free, some commercial and there is also an open source PGP replacement, which is compatible (in some cases, and this is a whole subject on it's own) with the "original" PGP. The version you chose should suit your use (personal or commercial) as well as the OS you are using. This leads on (in a roundabout way) to how you can encrypt files and folders... If you just want to encrypt a single file (or perhaps a small bunch of them), you can encrypt from Windows Explorer by right-clicking the file and using the PGP sub-menu. You then chose the keys you want to encrypt the file(s) to, put in your pass phrase and off you go. You might like to experiment with this on test files before you encrypt anything important. Essentially this process is a bit like creating an encrypted zip file. If you are looking to encrypt a whole folder, or more than one folder, this is time consuming and not practical for everyday work if you need repeated access to the contents of the folders. There are lots of products on the market that are capable of encrypting whole sections of your hard disk so that you can "open" them to use them and then "lock them" once you have finished. There are also products available that can encrypt your whole disk in real time (as yet, there is nothing like this from PGP, but we are hopeful..) For the moment, you might like to look at PGPDisk - I think there is still a free version of PGP which includes this <aside>Can anyone else shed light on this?</aside>. With PGPDisk, you can create "virtual hard drives" that are encrypted and have to be "opened" (in a process called "mounting") before you can use them. Sadly, I've run out of time on this lovely Friday morning - I hope this is some help to you. As one last thought: you might find it useful if you can get a colleague or a friend interested in PGP, so that you have someone to learn about encryption with: sending encrypted mail to yourself is not very interesting and managing multiple key pairs is more than you need to learn as a newbie. -- Regards, Richard | Using The Bat! 3.0.0.19 & SpamPal | Windows XP (build 2600), version 5.1 Service Pack 2
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