I learned that encrypting and signing your email is very important especially in today's  abundant digital world of e-commerce, hackers and cybercrimes. When you send an email to a friend it can fall into the wrong hands, where someone could tamper with it in cyberspace. Encrypting and signing your email helps to secure the identity of the person sending the data. Interestingly, if many people secured their email there would less spam. Regular email is like sending a postcard.  For instance, standard email messages are sent in plain text which makes it possible for anyone to read them and your message could contain credit card numbers or other sensitive information. So when you encrypt your mail, it makes the messages totally indecipherable to anyone who does not have a decryption key.

I also learned that " Pretty Good Privacy (PGP)"  is a data encryption (protecting info as it moves from one computer to another) and decryption(decoding of an encrypted message) computer program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication of data . PGP is mostly used for signing, encrypting and decrypting texts.

Private Key encryption: This is a method I used where both the sender and recipient of a message share a single key which is then used to encrypt or decrypt the message.

Public Key Encryption: This method uses a key ring. The key ring has a public key (available to everyone) and a private key( which is only known by the private key holder). They both work together.