GnuPG Made Easy (GPGME) is a library designed to make access to GnuPG easier for applications. It provides a High-Level Crypto API for encryption, decryption, signing, signature verification and key management. Currently it uses GnuPG's OpenPGP backend as the default, but the API isn't restricted to this engine. We have, in fact, already developed a backend for CMS (S/MIME).

Because the direct use of GnuPG from an application can be a complicated programming task, it is suggested that all software should try to use GPGME instead. This way bug fixes or improvements can be done at a central place and every application benefits from this. Furthermore, there is no guarentee that any particular command line option will remain exactly the same at any given point

Especially authors of MUAs should consider using GPGME.

See download section to download the latest tarball. The manual can be read here. The current version is 1.18.0.