PGP: Preferences

Here you can set your preferences. There are 5 menus: General, Files, Email, Servers and Advanced. Let's see them:

General

• Always encrypt to default key If this field is checked, whenever you encrypt a message (by means of a public key) also PGP encrypts it with your default public key. It is convenient to leave this setting turned on so when you send an encrypted message, then you can also decide to decrypt it. Otherwise you will never able to decrypt any message previoulsy encrypted by you!
• Cache decryption passphrases for This field specifies the amount of time (in hours: minutes: seconds) your passphrase is stored in your computer’s memory. If this field is not checked, you will have to type your passphrase every time you want to decrypt a message (this setting is useful when you know that you have to decrypt several messages during the same session).
• Cache signing passphrases for The same meaning of the previous field.
• Comment block (optional) You can enter an optional comment inside of your encrypted messages.
• Faster key generation When this field is checked, less time is required to create a new DH/DSS key.
• Display wipe confirmation dialog When this field is checked PGP will ask you with a confirmation before deleting (wipe) a file by overwriting it.

Files

Here you can specify where the 'pubring.pkr', 'secring.skr' and 'randseed.bin' are located. To be more secure, you could move these files to a floppy disk, specifying the path here (for example 'a:\keys\pubring.pkr' or 'a:\random\ranseed.bin')

Email

• Use PGP/MIME when sending email If this field is checked, PGP will encrypt all messages by means of the PGP/MIME standard. Though most of latest versions of almost all e-mail client use PGP/MIME, there are others which can't understand this standard.
• Word wrap clear-signed message at column This filed specifies the column number where a carriage return is used to wrap the text in your digital signature to the next line. I suggest you to increase the default value up to 72.
• Encrypt new messages by default If this field is checked PGP will encrypt all sent messages.
• Sign new messages by default If this field is checked PGP will sign all sent messages.
• Automatically decrypt/verify when opening messages If this field is checked, every times you open a message, PGP will attempt to decrypt/verify it.

Servers

Here you can add or delete a keyserver in your list. You can also set a keyserver contained in this list as your default keyserver.

Advanced

Here you can enable/disable an encryption algorithm. This 3 fields are checked by default. Deselect a field only if you have just decided that a particular algorithm is insecure.

• Display marginal validity level When this field is checked PGP will show you the keys' validity level.
• Treat marginally valid keys as invalid When this field is checked PGP will alert you whenever you attempt to use a marginal trusted key.
• Warn when encrypting to keys with ADK Non-international PGP versions allow ADK (Additional Decryption Key) so that an encrypted message maybe decrypted by means of 2 different keys. If this field is checked PGP will alert you whenever you choose to encrypt a message by means of a key which allow an additional key to decrypt it.