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Encryption? This Time it'll be Usable, Thunderbird Promises

posted by mrpg on Friday January 04 2019, @08:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the uy788*++ç+´] dept.

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

[...] When the Mozilla Foundation decided to turn the email client loose in May 2017, its future looked doubtful, but it's still here and, according to this post by community manager Ryan Sipes, donations are flowing freely enough for Thunderbird to expand its development team.

The current eight personnel are to be expanded to 14, and one of the roles to be resourced is an engineer who will focus on security and privacy.

"The UX/UI around encryption and settings will get an overhaul in the coming year," Sipes wrote.

While he couldn't guarantee that effort making it into the next release, "It is our hope to make encrypting Email and ensuring your private communication easier in upcoming releases."

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @10:53PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @10:53PM (#782278)

    I am guessing you mean they will be putting in GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) rather than PGP (Pretty Good Privacy).

  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday January 04 2019, @11:34PM (2 children)

    by NotSanguine (285) <{NotSanguine} {at} {SoylentNews.Org}> on Friday January 04 2019, @11:34PM (#782298) Homepage Journal

    I am guessing you mean they will be putting in GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) rather than PGP (Pretty Good Privacy).

    Actually, I mean OpenPGP [wikipedia.org]. Especially since these folks are talking about integrating encryption into Thunderbird.

    Given that they don't need to glom GPG onto Thunderbird (given that Enigmail already does that pretty well), I assume they will implement (as the GNU folks did) OpenPGP in their code.

    Oh, and by the way, GPG is an implementation of OpenPGP [wikipedia.org].

    So no. That's emphatically *not* what I mean.

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05 2019, @02:09AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05 2019, @02:09AM (#782359)

      On r/linux, Ryan Lee Sipes:

      We are talking to the developer of Enigmail, and also looking at pEp and Autocrypt. I will talk about this in the next blog post.

      And he also implied that since Thunderbird is now independent of Mozilla, you can donate to Thunderbird, and not have to worry about Moz://a getting their hands on it and diverting it somewhere else, as happened in the past to donations for Thunderbird.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05 2019, @09:19PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05 2019, @09:19PM (#782607)

      Ugh PGP... the whole "web of trust" thing is a pain. How about Thunderbird just spins up a CA that only signs S/MIME certs (since Letsencrypt refuses to do it) and include the root cert in Thunderbird. No identity verification, just that the cert requester has control of the email address. Make getting a cert part of the new account configuration wizard process and done.