[johnny_maxwell]

What's the point? This is equivalent to putting all postcards you receive in a safe so that no thief can read them if he breaks into your house.

I would think there is also other important data besides only mail on a PC, why not just go the safe route and encrypt your hard disk the proper way. File-by-file PGP encrypting stuff does not look like the best solution to me.

[sarba]

This makes most sense to do on hardware you don't own where the government can use a law from the 80s that says the government can read any email that's on hardware you don't own that's over 180 days old.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/emailprivacy/

[mike-cardwell]

Your reaction makes me think you didn't even read as far as the second paragraph... Your question is answered there.

Also worth noting that the blog post doesn't tell you to do this instead of using full disk encryption. There's nothing stopping you from doing both, and you should.

[petera]

Its a much more secure approach than using full disk encrpytion, no need to have non-public-keys on an exposed system.