Once in a while I am asked to give someone a crash course on PGP (or its free software implementation GnuPG), encryption and authentication. I usually push these poor souls into GPG with Mozilla Thunderbird and Enigmail, following a few well delimited steps which are stored on a text file somewhere which had their command line equivalent syntax. I guess the text file belongs here. Maybe one of these days…
This “complete idiots guide to GnuPG” assumes you’re using Windows and is, first of all, a buch of pointers for the “perfect” toolkit, altough everyone is free (and able) to do exactly the same using the command line utilities provided by GnuPG. It also make some assumptions I won’t detail here and which I assume to be too obvious.

1. Download the latest GPG windows binary from http://www.gnupg.org/ (gnupg-w32cli-x.x.x.exe). Install using the defaults.

2. Add the GnuPG binary directory to the PATH environment variable (it’s a list of directories separated by ; and accessible at My Computer->Properties->Advanced->Environment Variables)

3. Download the latest GPGShell binary from http://www.jumaros.de/rsoft/index.html. This will allow one to manage keys and execute encryption and verification operations using context menus (right click or taskbar). Install it using the defaults.

4. At the “Do you want to create your own key now?”, answer “no”. You’ll be able to create a new one or import an existing one later.

5. Import and Export and create keys at will.

6. Enigmail, the Mozilla Thunderbird extension which allows one to use the authentication and encryption features provided by GnuPG is available at http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ .

Enjoy.