The other day I got a popup telling me that a new version of the OS X mail app was available to download and install. I like to keep everything up-to-date as much as possible so I clicked on “Install.” As soon as the new version started, it informed me that it was disabling the GPGTools plugin that provides GPG encryption and signing of email.
Even though I’ve yet to convince most of my interlocutors that they should install GPG or PGP, I sign all my email so this was a big deal for me. In a panic I went searching for a work around or, at least, when a fix would be ready.
Happily, it turns out the panic was unwarranted. If this happens to you all you need to do is to go to the GPGTools site and download and reinstall the package. Once I did that, everything worked again. This is true even if you are already up-to-date and are merely reinstalling the same version. As I wrote this, I checked the GPGTools support site and noticed that they now have a notice about the problem prominently displayed so this post probably won’t be as useful but perhaps it will help one of my fellow Apple users.