The specific tests you did were fine, my code wasn't. Sorry for the bugs. Here's the latest gnus-encrypt.el and a working netrc.el that will do the right thing if there's an encryption model associated with a file. I tested them, let me know if you get good results too. At the end of gnus-encrypt.el is the old netrc.el code that supported OpenSSL. I'll enable that as well later, for now GPG is the only choice for external encryption. Ted