[OT] Why are you using the GPG / PGP keys?

[Zece Anonimescu]

Henry Hertz Hobbit:
> First, I have been using email and real Unix since the 1970s.
> I didn't use email to avoid paying postage.  Mostly I was mailing
> Prolog or other programs to others or them to me before 1995.

You don't have to use email to avoid paying postage. Back in «those
days» when people used to send letters instead of leaving unrelated
comments to Facebook statuses email wasn't the only mean of
communication. And it isn't today. Yet, today the postal service can
send you an email or SMS each time a parcel is delivered.

> Second, a fax is not email either from either a transmission or
> a legal standpoint.  Instead of being conducted down the
> digital Internet TCP/IP highway, faxes are tunneled through telephony
> equipment, digital or analog.  It is not legal to use even an
> OpenPGP signature on an email as legal tender in a court of law.
> But your hand writeen signature on a document that  faxedis legal
> tender in the United States and many other countries.

Quotation marks would have make a difference. It was a piece of an
imaginary dialogue: to make sure a fax has arrived people do use email.
They could use the phone, but the line can be busy. Well, I hear less
and less the busy signal over the phones. Nowadays the phone has more
lines, which does not enhance the abilities of the person on the other side.

> I suspect most people just select and delete all email messages
> in their active email account every few weeks or months.  This
> does not bode well for the usage of GnuPG.

Hence my initial question: why?