PGP: Making a Copy of a Public Key for Distribution

Unless the person sending you encrypted e-mail encrypts it with your public key you won't be able to decrypt with your secret key. So making a copy of your public key and distributing it your correspondents is a must. To make a copy of your public key type: pgp -kxa.

EXAMPLE: % pgp -kxa --- > This will create a file with an '.asc' extension; it is safe to e-mail this file or place it on a disk for distribution.

Resources used for this FAQ:

Zimmermann, Philip R. The Official PGP User's Guide. MIT Press. 1995. ISBN 0-262-74017-6