PGP is a way of signing, verifying, and encrypting data to be sent in plain text or over email using a self-signed key. You give people your public key and they are able to encrypt messages with it, that allegedly only your private key can decrypt.

For example: take a look at signed text at http://imgur.com/a/R8ua5 by changing the dave to bob it showed up as a bad signature stating it was not my original message. This helps somewhat with man in the middle attacks via email. In order to compromise a PGP key (easiest way) you would need the receiver's secret key, the message, and time to brute the password for the secret key before a revoke is issued. Quite a few steps and constraints.

If you have a Facebook account you can upload your public key to them and all your password resets and security emails will be encrypted using it. Adds two extra layers of security. I strongly recommend it to anyone who uses Facebook as centralized login auth, to slow down a compromised email from resetting your main FB password.

In this introduction I will show you how to:
•Install a beginner's Linux Distro (Mint.) I can show how to emulate this in Windows on VM if that works better for you. I will not go over how to set this up in Windows.
• Go over how to navigate in the Command Line Interface (basic easy stuff like: cd, cp, mv, vim/Gedit, ls, chmod, pgp commands etc)
•Generate your very first private key and armor public key.
•Create a Revoke cert as a failsafe
•Upload your public key to http://pgp.mit.edu/ via terminal.
•Once you are familiar with command line I can help you configure enigmamail GUI so you can easily decrypt and sign using imap Thunderbird if you choose.

Please do NOT disclose your email you are creating a key for, I don't want to know it.