response 1 of 2:

Nov 13 06:38 UTC 2001

Well what you do is you have a public key you share with friends.  They
use that key to encrypt the e-mail that is sent to you.  When you recieve
the e-mail you use pgp and your password to access your private key to
decode the e-mail.  When you want to send an encrypted message to a friend
you need their public key to encrypt the message, and they will use pgp
to decode it.  You can download pgp from a site at MIT, look on google.com
for more details.  PGP will create your public key automatically when you
install it.  If you use PGP under Outlook Express or Eudora it will be
integrated into your mail client, elsewise you have to paste your text into
PGPs clipboad, encrypt it, and then past the encrypted text back into your mail
client.  For more technical details there are specific items in this conference
on PGP.