Software reviews - Minimise your messaging footprint and workload [Reviews Software]

The technology to send and receive encrypted email has been around for a while, but on a smartphone it has been awkward or expensive to set up. That is changing now, with the arrival of free apps such as OpenKeychain for Android, which implements the OpenPGP v3 cryptographic specification, and K-9 Mail v5, an email app that provides the necessary hooks for OpenPGP. Ideally you will buy a set of digital keys (public and private keys) from a trusted provider and port those into OpenKeychain, but one of its advantages is that it can also generate ???self-signed??? keys for you. This is a computationally-heavy task that takes many minutes, but it is good for testing, it is cheap, and your keys will still let you sign, verify, encrypt and decrypt email. You can export self-signed keys from your phone if you need them to read your email on other devices such as a PC.