+By default, e-mails are transmitted without any protection around the
+Internet, which implies that they can be read and changed by lots of
+different parties. In particular, they are analyzed under bulk
+surveillance, which violates basic human rights. To defend those
+rights, digital self-defense is necessary (in addition to legal
+changes), and encryption and digital signatures are powerful
+techniques for self-defense. In essence, encryption ensures that
+only the intended recipient will be able to read a message, while
+digital signatures make sure that modifications to messages can be
+detected by the recipient.
+
+Nowadays, there are two major incompatible e-mail encryption
+standards, namely @acronym{OpenPGP} and @acronym{S/MIME}. Both of
+these standards are implemented by the @uref{https://www.gnupg.org/,
+GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG)}, which needs to be installed as external
+software in addition to GNU Emacs. Before you can start to encrypt,
+decrypt, and sign messages, you need to create a so-called key-pair,
+which consists of a private key and a public key. Your @emph{public} key
+(also known as @emph{certificate}, in particular with @acronym{S/MIME}), is
+used by others (a) to encrypt messages intended for you and (b) to verify
+digital signatures created by you. In contrast, you use your @emph{private}
+key (a) to decrypt messages and (b) to sign messages. (You may want to
+think of your public key as an open safe that you offer to others such
+that they can deposit messages and lock the door, while your private
+key corresponds to the opening combination for the safe.)
+
+Thus, you need to perform the following steps for e-mail encryption,
+typically outside Emacs. See, for example, the
+@uref{https://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual.html, The GNU Privacy
+Handbook} for details covering the standard @acronym{OpenPGP} with
+@acronym{GnuPG}.
+@enumerate
+@item
+Install GnuPG.
+@item
+Create a key-pair for your own e-mail address.
+@item
+Distribute your public key, e.g., via upload to key servers.
+@item
+Import the public keys for the recipients to which you want to send
+encrypted e-mails.
+@end enumerate
+
+Whether to use the standard @acronym{OpenPGP} or @acronym{S/MIME} is
+beyond the scope of this documentation. Actually, you can use one
+standard for one set of recipients and the other standard for
+different recipients (depending their preferences or capabilities).
+
+In case you are not familiar with all those acronyms: The standard
+@acronym{OpenPGP} is also called @acronym{PGP} (Pretty Good Privacy).
+The command line tools offered by @acronym{GnuPG} for
+@acronym{OpenPGP} are called @command{gpg} and @command{gpg2}, while
+the one for @acronym{S/MIME} is called @command{gpgsm}. An
+alternative, but discouraged, tool for @acronym{S/MIME} is
+@command{openssl}. To make matters worse, e-mail messages can be
+formed in two different ways with @acronym{OpenPGP}, namely
+@acronym{PGP} (RFC 1991/4880) and @acronym{PGP/MIME} (RFC 2015/3156).
+
+The good news, however, is the following: In GNU Emacs, Message
+supports all those variants, comes with reasonable defaults that can
+be customized according to your needs, and invokes the proper command
+line tools behind the scenes for encryption, decryption, as well as
+creation and verification of digital signatures.
+
+Message uses the @acronym{MML} language for the creation of signed
+and/or encrypted messages as explained in the following.
+