Q: What is "PGP"?
A: Whoops! Darn, you may have clicked the wrong button in your AOL browser... better click on that little thing that says "Back" right away.

Q: OK, Then What Does "PGP" Stand For?
A: PGP either stands for "Pretty Good Privacy," or for "privacy self-empowerment through strong data encryption for communicating electronically in a free society," depending on how you interpret the phrase "stands for." In the former case, by the way, it's a registered trademark.

Q: Can't Someone Please Help Me with PGP?
A: Yes, Viriginia, there are nice people waiting to help you get started with PGP: for generic questions, or just some help learning to use the software, you can send email to the PGP Help Team. It's free, and there's an explanation of how to ask for help below.
Important Note: The Help Team's address is not a standard "subscription" list open to the general public, nor is it a software robot to which you can send messages containing only the word "help" or "info". It's a group of volunteer humans ...well, after we've showered and had a cuppa Joe.

Q: Is PGP Hard to Learn?
A: If you've already purchased a computer, or installed (or know how to use) the OS and TCP/IP stack on it, and/or acquired an Internet account/connection and gotten as far as this web page, you'll probably figure PGP out pretty quickly, especially with some help from us. Even if you didn't do all that, we can still try to help you... unless you haven't got the computer yet. PGP is a very "elegant" solution to the age-old problem of how to communicate easily and securely and no more difficult than learning the rules to Chess.

Q: Do I Have to Be a Rockit Scientologist to Ask Questions?
A: Heck No! The PGP Help Team will attempt to answer any level of question, ranging from crypto-newbie (our favorite) right on up to ultra-paranoiac-cypherpunk-hacker-wacko. Take your best shot. Of course, it probably wouldn't hurt if you're a rocket scientist...
Note: the PGP Help Team address is not the appropriate forum for you to send suggestions about how to "improve" PGP, or for PGP bug reports.

Q: Can You People Answer Questions about PGP for My Platform?
A: Yes, we have team members who run PGP on many different hardware platforms and under different Operating Systems, so there's usually someone who can help you with your particular situation. If we can't for some reason, like if your OS doesn't exist yet, we'll find you someone who can.

Q: Will You Answer Questions About PGPfone Too?
A: Maybe, but probably not. In any case, for now you can read the beta documentation on the Web and ask questions about PGPfone here.

Q: I Live in {Insert Country Here}: Can You Help Me?
A: Actually, because of the extremely restrictive US laws governing both the export of cryptosystems and any technical assistance therewith to foreign nationals, we may be limited in our ability to help you if you live in certain countries. We are as upset as you are if this is the case, but even in such cases, we'll at least try to find you someone outside the USA who is permitted to help you. Remember: it's not illegal to ask! Well, not yet, anyway.

Q: Can You Send Me a Copy of the PGP Software?
A: No, as much as we'd like to, we can't. Because PGP is classified as a "munition," we require you to obtain the software on your own to protect our members from any possibility of indictment for "exporting armaments." Please do not ask us to send you any cryptographic software (not including various scripts and other crypto-neutral software). Ironically, we can explain the underlying math to you, though we're not willing to place ourselves in legal jeopardy otherwise. However, we can and will help you to find where to legally download the software from your geographic location.

Q: Does the Help Team Have a PGP Public Key?
A: You can send your public key (if you have one already), accompanied by your question, to the Team for testing purposes, and individual members may at some point furnish you with their keys so that you can encrypt messages to them, but we have not yet found it necessary post a key for the Team.

Submitting a question to the PGP Help Team is a three-step process:

  RTFM.
In cypherpunk lingo, that means "Read The Fhpxvat Manual". Please do your homework: the all-volunteer Help Team is only here to help you get started with, or figure out how to customize, PGP. The complete PGP documentation always accompanies an "official" PGP release archive (PGP-signed and verifiable). The docs were written by Philip Zimmermann (the original author of PGP), and are actually pretty entertaining (for software documentation). They explain the social context of PGP, the basic public key encryption concepts and even some caveats to keep you from getting too cocky about your security. Please read the documentation before attempting your initial PGP setup and/or before generating your first key pair - and definitely before submitting any question(s) to the Help Team. We assume you've looked through the basic documentation already, so don't make us remind you!

Arne Helme has created an easy-to-browse hypertext version of Phil Z's PGP documentation.

There are many other FAQs and information sources about PGP.
Here's a short list to start you off:

 FTP and WWWeb:
   - PGP, Inc.'s's official website.

   - Jeff Licquia's Official PGP FAQ.
   - Michael Johnson's Where is PGP FAQ. (mirror)
   - Francis Litterio's excellent Cryptography, PGP and Your Privacy page.
   - Mathew's comprehensive, link-filled Introduction to PGP page.
   - Derek Atkins maintains the technical FAQ, Known Bugs, and Improvements page at MIT.
   - Dave Del Torto's Crypto Info directory.
   - The central Cypherpunks Archive at UC Berkeley.
   - The definitive Cypherpunks mailing list archives at HKS.
   - The crypt/cypherpunks directory at Maricopa.
   - The Cryptography Archive at Quadralay Corp.
  ...and of course, you can search the Web yourself using:
   - Digital Equipment Corp's powerful Alta Vista search engine, or visit;
   - C|NET Central's Search.com collection of 250+ Web search engines.

 Usenet:
   - The "alt.security.pgp" newsgroup.
   - The "sci.crypt" newsgroup.
   - The "talk.politics.crypto" newsgroup.
   - The "news.answers" newsgroup.

  Prepare a Clear Question.
Although we try to respect each question sent to us, we occasionally get questions that aren't even clearly stated. If you ask a difficult-to-answer question, we don't mind. If you ask a question badly, however, we'll still try to help, but being volunteers we reserve the right to be amused. We much prefer a "clear" question: one which has the following characteristics:

  - It includes all pertinent info we might need to know (see sample below);
  - It completely describes your PGP problem or the concept you're unclear about;
  - It's ethical and doesn't ask us to violate the laws of any country in any way;
    (eg. Can you help me break into my wife's diary? No! )
  - It's short, to-the-point, pithy, brief, compact, concise, condensed and succinct;
  - It's written in coherent, complete, punctuated sentences using something approximating the English.
    (Don't worry: we don't mind if English is not your native language. Just try your best.)

Here's a Sample Request Form that you can copy & paste into your message's Body and use as a template for presenting your problem to us. If you don't know what something mentioned below means, don't worry: just leave it blank and we'll explain how to get the info we need later if necessary (italic items are optional):

...................................cut here....................................

 1. My Location:           (if outside the USA or Canada)
 2. Hardware Platform:     (Sparc/68K Mac/PowerMac/80486/Pentium/etc)
 3. Manufacturer, Model:   (Apple, Quadra 840av/etc)
 4. Operating System:      (BSD UNIX/Win95/MacOS 7.5.x/etc)
 5. PGP Version Number:    (2.7.1/2.6.2v131/etc)
 6. Problem Description:   (what I did, and what happened)
 7. Error Messages I Saw:  (logfile/console-listing/dialog text)
 8. Version's responsible engineer:  (person who compiled it)
 9. Where I obtained it:             (FTP dir/Web URL/TLA/etc)
10. Other software involved:         (mailer/etc)
11. My hat size:                     (XS/S/L/XL/F)
12. My Public Key:                   (insert ASCII-fied key here)

  Send Your Question to the Help Team.
Once you have prepared your question using the template above, address an email message as follows:

       To: pgp-help-humans@hks.net
  Subject: [Q?] insert_problem_summary_here
     Body: insert_completed_sample_request_form_template_here

After you submit your initial help request to the Team address (pgp-help-humans@hks.net), one of the team members will assign her/himself to you and answer your question by return mail.

Normally, someone will answer you pretty quickly. However, if you don't receive any reply within 12 hours, there may be a temporary problem with the "hks.net" host, or your own mailhost may be having trouble. First, contact your local mail administrator to make sure the problem isn't on your end, then try the backup address.

Your helper will also carbon-copy his/her answers to the Team address so the entire Help Team can see the questions and answers. This is for everyone's benefit: if one of us accidentally says something misleading (rare), others will politely jump in with corrections. The process is informal, but it's been working pretty well for over a year now with minimal casualties.

Note: if you need to ask follow-up questions, you should always address them to the entire Team, unless you're specifically directed by the team member who first answered you to send it to him/her only. The "average" question typically requires 1-3 answers (from us), but your mileage may vary.