Encrypting data from website and email to owner

PGP are no longer inexpensive

[kapow]

My sites are on Unix servers with Apache. I heard that PGP is a good way to encrypt CC data and email it. It seems that PGP have been taken over by McAfee - who say: I need: And McAfee eBusiness Server [mcafeeb2b.com...]
and this costs £5000 !
And McAfee eBusiness Client (to decrypt the emails) costs £500 !

Is there a less expensive way :(

All I need to do is capture some secure info on a booking form and send it encrypted to my client - who then decrypts it.

[scotty]

Of course, there is always the GNU Private Guard [gnupg.org] (GnuPG). It is "mostly" compatible with PGP, and with the release of 1.0.7 in April, it is now even more secure :) We have quite a few applications here (web and XML-RPC based) that relies on automating GnuPG, and its command line interface is really nice.

[kapow]

Thankyou Scotty
GnuPG looks excellent, and FREE :) I have had the same advice from three other good sources.

Now I need a guide on how to get my windows based client setup to decrypt his emails. Any pointers much appreciated.

Thanks again

[scotty]

There are quite a few GnuPG front-end on Windows, and Windows Privacy Tray [winpt.org] and GPGShell [jumaros.de] are the two that's most popular. I use Mozilla as my main email reader, and Enigmail [enigmail.mozdev.org] has very nice Mozilla integration - even better than PGP 7 for Outlook/Outlook Express I reckon. The hardest bit is probably setting up the keyrings and exchange keys, etc.

GnuPG has a very nice command line integration. For example, if you want to encrypt a file, you can automate it easily.

PASSPHRASE="gnupg rocks"
RECIPIENT="[e-mail]"
(echo $PASSPHRASE; cat file_to_be_encrypted) ¦ \
 gpg --passphrase-fd 0 -r $RECIPIENT -a -e -s ¦ \
 mail -s "IMPORTANT!!!" $RECIPIENT

(Edit: fixed up the code)