The tenth OpenPGP email summit

Summary

May 20, 2026 This article was contributed by Heiko Schäfer, Andrew Gallagher, and David Runge. The OpenPGP Email Summit is an annual meeting for those who work on encrypted email and related topics. The tenth installment of this meeting took place in March 2026 and the minutes have now been published. As usual, a wide range of topics were discussed. Highlights included support for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) with multiple actors planning rollouts within this year, a promising new approach for making email signatures ubiquitous with the plan of making OpenPGP signed email a default, a new draft that brings reliable deletion (or "forward secrecy") features to OpenPGP, as well as a plan for transferring ownership of the OpenPGP.org domain. The summit attendees represented many projects, providers, and other interested parties in the space including Delta Chat, FreePG, Hagrid, Hockeypuck, keys.openpgp.org (KOO), Proton, Ripasso, RNP, Sequoia-PGP, Signstar, Thunderbird, VOA, and others. Governance and the openpgp.org Domain Phil Zimmermann is the current owner of the OpenPGP.org domain. He was not at the summit, but he had communicated that he wants to hand off this digital asset to the community; the community would prefer to find a setup that doesn't require any individual to take on personal responsibility. The keys.openpgp.org (KOO) board is one existing governance body that could take over the domain. Its current mandate is narrowly focused on running the keys.openpgp.org keyserver. It is exploring taking on responsibility for the domain, using the Wau Holland Foundation as a trustee. The foundation is loosely connected with the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) and has been the sponsor of the OpenPGP email summit over the past ten years. Its members are deeply invested in the proliferation of the OpenPGP ecosystem. As a next step, the KOO board has proposed a constitutional change to the voting body. PQC in OpenPGP PQC was one of the topics discussed at this summit. Th...