At the moment alot only supports signing of outgoing mails via PGP/MIME (RFC 3156). Encryption via PGP/MIME (RFC 3156) is in an experimental stadium.
Note
To use GPG with alot, you need to have gpg-agent running.
gpg-agent will handle passphrase entry in a secure and configurable way, and it will cache your passphrase for some amount of time so you don’t have to enter it over and over again. For details on how to set this up we refer to gnupg’s manual.
Signing outgoing emails
You can use the commands sign, unsign and togglesign in envelope mode to determine if you want this mail signed and if so, which key to use. To specify the key to use you can pass a hint string as argument to the sign or togglesign command. This hint would typically be a fingerprint or an email address associated (by gnupg) with a key.
Signing (and hence passwd entry) will be done at most once shortly before a mail is sent.
In case no key is specified, alot will leave the selection of a suitable key to gnupg so you can influence that by setting the default-key option in ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf accordingly.
You can set the default to-sign bit and the key to use for each account individually using the options sign_by_default and gpg_key.
Tips
In case you are using alot via SSH, we recommend to use pinentry-curses instead of the default graphical pinentry. You can do that by setting up your ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf like this:
pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-curses
Encrypt outgoing emails
You can use the commands encrypt and unencrypt in envelope mode to encrypt the mail. You have to give a hint string as argument to the encrypt command. This hint would normally be a fingerprint of the key.
Encryption is done after signing (if signing is enabled) the email.