If you regularly send confidential information via e-mail and wish to make it as secure as possible, one option for OS X users is GPGTools, which provides encryption and decryption services for any of your e-mail accounts.

GPGTools is a free and open-source encryption project for OS X, based on OpenPGP, which gives OS X users quick access to options for signing and encrypting e-mail messages, as well as offering file-level services for encrypting documents and folders. The project has been around since 2011, but was recently updated to version 2, and supports a number of new features. The suite no longer becomes disabled when OS X is updated, it now works properly with exchange servers, it has new hot-key options for toggling signing and encrypting, and offers quick-switching between OpenPGP and S/MIME standards for providing digital signatures.

The GPGTools suite will give you encryption and signing controls for each message.

Once installed, the program first launches the GPGTools keychain manager, where you set up key pairings for your e-mail addresses and those of recipients (the installer opens a help page in your browser to guide you... [Read more]