PGP

Because of the nature of the Internet, such as it is, you may wish to keep any conversation to me unable to be read by anyone but me — this could be due to the sensitive nature of the content you're sending me, or simply as an exercise in good Net Communication hygiene (as overkill as it may be). In order to do this, you can e-mail me using PGP, arguably the gold standard for end-to-end encryption¹⁾, to obfuscate the contents of your message.

PGP is known for being very effective at the expense of user friendliness, to the point that attempting to concisely explain how to send me an encrypted email with it suddenly becomes a rather difficult task as the step-by-step varies between software, operating systems, implementations… If you have no idea how PGP works, this article explains it rather well.

To make it very short, I have a pair of Public and Private Keys. You use the Public Key to encrypt the message, and I use the Private Key to decrypt it once I receive it. Some e-mail clients, and even some web clients, have their own implementation of PGP which may help you in the process; otherwise, there's still plenty of software that helps you expedite the process of generating key pairs and encrypting/decrypting by hand. For example, I use Kleopatra in both Windows and Linux which is email software-agnostic and could even use it to decrypt text sent through another way; meanwhile, the cock.li mailhost provider suggests Enigmail, which works as a plugin for a handful of email software.

The PGP key that was here
is no longer valid as of 2025.

• If you wish for me to reply in the same fashion, I will also need your PGP Public Key, which you will have to generate along with your Private Key and then send in your email to me²⁾. Make sure you tell me that you're expecting an equally encrypted answer in case the nature of the conversation doesn't make it glaringly obvious. I am not a clever man.

• The need to add PGP arises mostly out of concern raised by acquaintances regarding my (most likely temporary) choice of e-mail provider, as the structure and organization of cock.li is such that its owner could read my e-mails' content at any given time. To this I concede that it is indeed a true and valid concern: Mr. Canfield of cock.li, or any other individual pertaining to OvO Systems Ltd. who may have direct access to the mailservers could, in theory, go through my email. However, it's imperative that I point out that this is also true of virtually every other email service, and especially those pertaining to major, well-known Internet companies (e.g. GMail and the like). Email protocols per se do not offer encryption services, so your messages could be freely intercepted as they're being sent between servers and downloaded/read by your email client of choice, either by people in charge of these servers or an external malicious actor or actors. There are very few, if any, services that guarantee content-blindness at a server level (so-called “zero access encryption”) so as to be protected from prying eyes even when stored in the servers³⁾. PGP encryption, while cumbersome, remains the best for the purpose of ensuring privacy whether you actually need it or if you simply wish to exercise your entitlement to the privacy of your words.