...

secure stuff. Anyone here have any other suggestions on making encryption less of a pain?

This may seem a little excessive, but the only sensible way to use pgp in environments like yours or prz's (heh heh) is to set yourself up with your own site at home, either with a dialup SLIP/PPP feed or a plain and cheap uucp feed. Both of those options are becoming much cheaper than they used to be, and you can run suitable software on all sorts of computers - whatever you're using to dial in to your timeshare service at the moment would probably do, as long as its not just a dumb terminal. DOS, a free unix or linux, Amiga, Atari - they can all handle at least uucp if not tcp/ip too. If you don't have suitable hardware, you can surelu find a 286 dos box with an old 20Mb drive and plain text- only display secondhand somewhere for $200 or less... that'll run UUPC or even KA9Q.

Why not just get Nupop, a freeware mail downloader, off Simtel? No good for reading newsgroups, but mail, no problem.

If you care about privacy in your email, you *have* to run it all the way into your own machine.

Agreed.