Welcome to the PGP Forwarding Server. This server accepts e-mail for you, encrypts it with your public key and sends it over to your real address. Great effort takes place to make sure that no one can accidentally send you plain text.
This text is quite brief, to give you an overview. Be sure to look for the other documents for in-depth documentation.
Actually, this text is really rubbish. Someone who is totally new to this concept will not understand what is going on ... I have to rewrite it!
You should keep in mind that this server is for two people roles:
Aunt Ann: that's someone that does not have any clue how to use PGP, but needs to communicate with you. Maybe it's your boss, maybe it's your lawyer, we don't know. All that those people need to know is that your e-mail address is <user@public.org>. They send all their mail to domain and that's it.
Uri User: that's you! A person in a, hmm, interesting location. You want to communicate with those tenthousand Aunt Anns securely, but you cannot tell all of them how to install PGP. So you do it throught the server.
(There are more roles, but currently this is not relevant)
The whole idea does only work if we can divide the world into two parts. One part there it is ok for your e-mail to be in cleartext (e.g. behind your company firewall) and an outside part (e.g. the internet).
Here is a little illustration:This system has two interfaces: one for commands and one for users.
The command interface is currently available via
hub@secret.org
hub@public.org
These addresses accept commands and, throught the to command, they can be used to send e-mail to anyone anonymously. Important: whenever you sent and e-mail to the command interface you must encrypt and PGP-sign this e-mail. The PGP Forwarding Server checks your identity only from the PGP signature, the used e-mail address doesn't interest. This has to done this way because anybody could forge e-mail addresses.
However, only you as a user deals with the command interface ever. All your friends (and Aunt Ann, of course) just send e-mail to you directly:
username@secret.org
username@public.org