PGP and S/MIME are two standards for securing email communications. PGP uses public/private key encryption and digital signatures to encrypt messages and verify their source. It generates a session key to encrypt the message, then encrypts the session key with the recipient's public key. The recipient decrypts the session key with their private key to decrypt the message. PGP compresses, encodes, and splits large messages for transmission over email. Keys are stored on key rings protected by passphrases, and message integrity is verified using hash functions and digital signatures.