You can encrypt email on an iPhone with your standard Mail app or with apps from the App Store, no jailbreaking required. The Apple experts at Stack Exchange provide some tips.


I've started taking security more seriously lately. Now, I have emails signing automatically and encrypting where I have their key. Previously I only did this when necessary, but I'm trying to breed a sense of change. I have no issue with GPG in Thunderbird, Outlook, or on Android with K9 Mail and APG, but I have no idea how to handle GPG on iOS.


I can't accept that there's no way—it seems ridiculous, or maybe I'm approaching the problem wrong and there is a more appropriate route than GPG?

See the original question.

PGP is a fantastic standard and has many uses and great implementations, but if you want to sign and encrypt email with a minimum of fuss, I think you'll find as I have that S/MIME is more well-supported. Many mail clients (including the stock Mail apps on iOS and OS X, and other popular clients such as Microsoft Outlook) can handle S/MIME out of the box with no add-ons. Email certificates are authenticated by a CA, like SSL certificates for the web, instead of requiring you to rely on the PGP web of trust to authenticate others' certificates and have them authenticate yours.

You can get a free S/MIME certificate from StartSSL. Once you've created it, you can export it from your browser (be sure to use a passphrase!), email it to yourself, then open it within the iOS mail application to install it. Your Mail account settings will then offer options to use the installed certificate to sign and/or encrypt your mail. (I have no affiliation with StartSSL, other than as a satisfied, non-paying customer.)

A Couple PGP Options (Answered by Gilby♦ Dave♦

Try iPGMail. From the iTunes descriptions: "iPGMail is an app that implements the OpenPGP standard (RFC 4880) and allows the user to create and manage both public and private (RSA and DSA) PGP keys and send and receive PGP encrypted messages."


Another option is oPenGP. oPenGP is a solution to support OpenPGP standard (RFC 4880) on your iOS device.

Editor's note: These answers have been condensed from their original forms.

You don't necessarily need a program to do encryption. Yes, if you want PGP, you'll need one of the programs above. If you want to have simple signing and encryption just get a certificate (free email cert is available from Comodo) and upload it on the phone.


Once added a verified mark will appear in your contact card for the corresponding email address. Now you can go into mail account setting and enable encryption and signing. The only downside is that you can't activate/deactivate per message. You have to restart the mail app once signing or encryption is activated/deactivated. The same process goes if you have a Mac/OSX and are using the native mail app.

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