Leo writes:

With the latest news that your email can legally be read by your ISP, the receiving ISP, and any server in the middle, encrypting email is even more important than ever before.

Securing your email can take two forms, signing or encrypting.

An email signature can ensure that the message was sent by you and has not been tampered with (but it can still be read). You can send a signed email to anyone, but they’ll need some software to verify it, usually PGP. You can use PGP to sign mail (that’s what I do) or get a certificate from somewhere like Thawte.

Encrypting the email scrambles it completely so only the recipient can read it. To send an encrypted email you’ll first need the recipient’s public key. Many folks, including me, put our public keys on various keyservers like keyserver.pgp.com and keys.pgp.net. Your PGP software should be able to search the servers for an appropriate key.

• For free PGP software visit PGP International You can also get a free version for non-commercial use from PGP Corporation.
• Thawte offers free email certificates suitable for signing or encrypting.
• An even easier way to send secure email is Hushmail, a web based email service. Hushmail offers free and paid encryption services.
• J Hess adds: There is the Windows Privacy Tools project that includes a set of free Open Source tools to help make it easy to encrypt and sign your e-mail.