begin quoting what Robert Conde said on Sun, Mar 24, 2002 at 03:07:40PM -0500: > What would you suggest as an alternative?
Like I said, it's a tradeoff. If it's important that you be able to refer back to the contents, encrypting to yourself is necessary. If it's important that you NOT be able to refer back to the contents, encrypting to yourself is harmful. As I said, I'm not suggesting which of these considerations is more important to you; I'm just making sure everybody reading keeps in mind the tradeoffs before they decide. A lot of people, when they see a "how-to" post in a mailing list, immediately go do whatever it was. They tend to be the less-sophisticated users, and thus the least likely to have considered the implications. I'd say, if you're encrypting messages to avoid snooping ISP techs, you are probably safe encrypting to yourself. (BTW, snooping ISP techs are more common than you might think, despite the fact that it's a federal felony if you aren't doing it as a necessary part of providing service.) If you're encrypting messages because you're doing something you don't want some authority figure to discover, you don't want to encrypt to yourself, because that opens you up to the use of coercion to disclose the contents. PGP was designed to serve both purposes, which is why it allows you a choice on this. That's also why Mutt keeps the email in encrypted form, instead of decrypting and saving. Some mail solutions don't do that, and are thus only satisfactory for avoiding snooping techs, not corrupt authorities.
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