More specifically, if I was to attach my public key to every email — even when the recipient doesn’t use PGP.
My assumption is that “life would carry on” and there would be basically no difference but I’m not entirely sure.
the process of using PGP for encrypting content (text messages for example) is something I’m only just started understanding after some reading and practicing
EDIT
Since a couple of people have mentioned it, my email provider provides E2EE between users but it I want to have E2EE with non-users and via my aliases (SimpleLogin) with custom domains I’ll need PGP
—BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—
Side effects include all of your contacts calling you freakin nerd.
—END PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—
Signing every message should have zero effect for people who don’t use PGP; they’ll just have a cryptic block of text at the bottom of the message you sent.
It’s overkill to ship your pubkey with every email. Most people just publish to a trusted keyserver and call it a day since pretty much every client worth its salt can look up your pubkey directly.
Please tell me clients handle everything automatically/on the fly…I recently read a comment making a “joke” about the hassle of needing to manually decrypt/encrypt and the tradeoffs of security…and I can’t tell if it was real
One thing I can think of is an overzealous corporate security solution blocking or holding back your email purely for having an attachment, or because it misunderstands/presumes the cipher-looking text file to be an attempt to bypass filtering.
Other than that might be curious questions from curious receivers of the key/file they may not understand, and will not be expecting. (“What’s this for? Is this part of the contract documents? Oh well, I’ll forward it to the client anyway”)
Other than that it’s a public key, go for it. Hard (for me anyway) to decide to post them to public keychains when the bot-nets read them for spam, so this might be the next best thing?
People will assume you work on Cybersecurity.
Edit: Also, people will use this method to verify an email is from you.
No
