🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm interested in using secure mail or some sort, but my present
options are insecure, inconvenient, or both.

I have internet access through hosts that I do not control.  As the
PGP manual points out, this is very insecure.  I can dial in, using a
terminal emulator on a macintosh.

For secure mail I seem to have two choices.  

The simple but inconvenient choice is to use kermit to xfer encrypted
messages between my mac and my internet host.  I don't like this
because of the significant effort required to deal with encrypted
mail: no longer could I simply "reply" to a message, or even read it.
I'd have to
  1. log on the unix box
  2. write encrypted messages to a file
  3. kermit the file to my mac
  4. leave the terminal emulator, returning to the mac
  5. decrypt the message.
  6. compose a reply, outside of my standard unix mail environment
  7. write reply to a file, encrypt it
  8. kermit reply back to the unix box
  9. go back to terminal emulator, send mail.

This is simply too inconvenient to do on a large scale.  Or even a
small scale.

An alternative which is more complex to implement, and requires
changing the way I handle mail, but is much more convenient, is to
read all mail on my mac.  Ideally en/decrypting messages would be
built into the mail reader, but at worst I could en/decrypt local
files - avoiding the kermit steps above.  But I don't know how to go
about doing this.  Are there products on the market that do this?  Do
I need to make my mac a full-fledged internet host?

How have others dealt with this problem?  Are there convenient and
secure solutions?

Finally, I have seen references to RIPEM, but don't know anything
about it.  Would someone fill me in or give me a pointer?  I'm
guessing it's a public key system, using the rsa algorithm, blessed by
pkp.  Is there a macintosh version?

Thanks.
--
Mike Rose, mrose@stsci.edu, 410-338-4949