Any way for two correspondents to set up gnupg within a few moments without having to become expert?

[Michael Anders]

On Tue, 2014-01-21 at 14:19 +0000, Steve Jones wrote:

> How do I prevent gnupg from using SHA1? Also how do I update my key to not use SHA1 digests which it appears to be using, as well as listing SHA1 as my second favourite algorithm.
> 
I found a description in the
web( http://sparkslinux.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/hashing-algorithm-is-your-gpg-configuration-secure/) that told me to do the following:

You locate the file "gpg.conf" 
On my ubuntu it is in the directory ~/.gnupg/
In this file you can add the three lines at the bottom

personal-cipher-preferences AES256 TWOFISH AES192 AES
personal-digest-preferences SHA512 SHA384 SHA256
personal-compress-preferences ZLIB BZIP2 ZIP

to set the preferences. GnuPG is supposed to pick the leftmost possible
in the respective lists.
But backup before editing! I remember some recent posts on problems
editing GnuPG config files and tranferring to and fro windows and linux.
There seems to be a danger to mess up things using wrong editor
settings.


I don't know if hash preference information is additionally attached to
keys. I would guess it is not, it wouldn't make sense to me.

regards,
   Michael Anders