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I've been using e-mail for over a decade in a regular business environment, but I can not remember having seen any invitation from anybody to GPG sign my e-mails (or somebody who offered to send GPG-signed e-mails). Nevertheless, GPG appears to be the de-facto e-mail signing encryption mechanism.

So my question is: in what kind of environments have you seen GPG being used frequently? I'm thinking in specific industries, or perhaps only within companies where everybody has been trained and has their keys set up. But I'd like to hear from people who have actual experience with this. And is it useful to publish my key and put this in my signature, to see if other 'hidden' users will actually tell me that they also use GPG, or is this not very common among regular business users?

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I'd been signing all my email for years, but as far as I know, no one ever verified a signature, nor asked me for my key. I stopped bothering around the beginning of this year. – Wyzard Jul 20 '12 at 1:43
Sorry, but this question isn't asking for one definite answer, but rather leaning towards discussion. This falls under not constructive (please see the FAQ) – as every answer is equally valid. – slhck♦ Jul 20 '12 at 1:44
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But GPG signing is used in open-source developer communities, such as the Linux kernel maintainers and the Debian developers, to ensure integrity of submitted code. – Wyzard Jul 20 '12 at 1:44
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But if you want to "advertise" that you use GPG, just sign the email you send. The digital signature includes your key ID, so you don't have to include it in the message text. – Wyzard Jul 20 '12 at 1:46
Looking at the most popular e-mail clients I would rather say that S/MIME is the standard for e-mail signatures. – Robert Jul 20 '12 at 8:26

closed as not constructive by slhck♦, Paul, Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams, MaQleod, 8088 Jul 20 '12 at 11:34

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I ran technical support for an enterprise software company with a lot of Fortune 500 customers. Our product was used by the development organizations within those companies. Log files and crash dumps from our product would necessarily contain some of their proprietary information. Some customers had strict IT policies on this data, which they viewed as critical IP: it was explicitly specified in their support agreements that all email communications must be encrypted, and so GPG/PGP keys were exchanged, all messages signed, etc.

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