at least you had a friend to email! I couldn't get any of my friends to do it. "Man we can encrypt our emails." "But why..." "It'd be cool" "This seems hard." "Come on, exchange keys with me." "I don't want to make one."
For awhile you could use Pidgin and OTR to even have secure messages through facebook's messenger. I'm not sure if they decrypted it or not, but it sure was fun.