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9to5Linux is reporting on the new version of Thunderbird which now supports OpenPGP by default:
Thunderbird 78.2.1 has been released today and it finally enables the OpenPGP feature by default. That's amazing news for privacy and security fans enthusiasts using the open-source email client as they won't have to go to all the trouble of enabling OpenPGP in the latest Thunderbird 78 series.
After you update to Thunderbird 78.2.1, you'll be able to access the OpenPGP Key Manager window from the Tools menu by clicking on the hamburger menu on the right side of the window (see the screenshot above for details).
So as of Thunderbird 78.2.1, it will no longer be necessary to use the Enigmail add-on and that add-on ends on an amicable note. Enigmail for Thunderbird will be supported for 6 months now but will continue for Postbox.
Previously:
(2018) Google Takes Further Steps to Eliminate Third-Party E-Mail
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday August 31 2020, @07:24PM (10 children)
It took 17 years to implement this feature.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday August 31 2020, @07:32PM (8 children)
Thunderbird? I'll keep the box
What happened twenty years ago?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2020, @07:37PM (7 children)
What DIDN'T happen 20 years ago is the question.
Email was just then being adopted as a communication tool by the masses and the major players never released and made "standard" encrypted email and the required crypto infrastructure. There was a moment when encrypted email could've been the norm, but the majors never cared to make it happen. The moment is passed.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday August 31 2020, @07:44PM (6 children)
So, dependence on the major players is the problem. Who let that happen?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2020, @08:58PM (1 child)
That smug approach never got the job done.
For most people to use something, you have to make it the default for most people. This is how standards that rely on network effects get adopted.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday August 31 2020, @09:53PM
"Standards" come a dime a dozen, and are pushed by salesmen. The best ones rarely survive.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday September 01 2020, @07:18AM (1 child)
It wasn't really dependence on major players, it was that OpenPGP, and its alternative S/MIME, was waaaaay too hard to ever be usable by anything other than a small group of hardcore geeks.
Then STARTTLS and Signal/Telegram/whatever came along, and it became irrelevant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2020, @07:53PM
OpenPGP still has a place. StartTLS on encrypts transport. i would still like the mail to be encrypted while sitting on the server. xmpp with omemo is nice too but the endpoints are real shit fests so email and desktops are still important sometimes.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Tuesday September 01 2020, @07:34AM (1 child)
So who let that happen? In part you did, as did the rest of us. Much of the cause of the centralization was the half-hearted, technically oriented fight against spam rather than using the existing legal framework against it. Instead of a legal fight, people designed ineffective systems and technical methodologies that lent themselves to centralization.
There were two parts to the spam problem. The first part was that although spam was (and is) illegal in many areas, no one went after those hiring the spammers. Then the floodgates opened when a small handful of politicians in Northern Europe proclamed loudly that spam was "good for the economy". Another part of the spam flood was that during the growth of spam as a phenomenon it was part and parcel of the M$ Windows ecosystem: plug in a Windows box to a fat pipe and over time notice the available bandwidth become smaller and smaller. There were still technical and semi-technical communities around then so there was some discussion about th 4 to 16 minute average survival time of Windows, but managers were already lost. With the gradual prohibition of technical criticism of M$ products, spam was able to grow and prosper. Thus with the proliferation of Internet-enabled Windows desktops, you ended up with the global tsunami of spam. The technical communities' responses to that were all (duh) technical and rather inadvertantly led to severe centralization such that only big players could even begin to participate and only the biggest among them could flourish. Permanently blacklisting temporary IP addresses was maybe the most harmful there.
Encrypted e-mail has little available beyond its headers for datamining. So while that may be of interest to corporate and governmental intelligence departments, it is weak for advertising. Therefore the centralized players actually had (and still have) a disincentive to provide encrypted messages, whether RFC e-mail or other forns of written messaging.
About the e-mail encryption specifically, back then the creator of PGP, Phil Zimmermann, had just won a protracted defence against the US government over PGP. During the fight he had to use all his time and resources on legal efforts and only then if there was any time over could PGP get some maintenance. He had little to no time for development and as radioactive as the US tried to make the technology no one else would touch it, especially to redesign the UI or work flow. Cryptography was classified as a munition during that era.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday September 01 2020, @06:27PM
Thank you. Very well put.
"good for the economy" means good for their pocketbooks.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 31 2020, @07:45PM
The only way something like PGP is worthwhile is if most everybody uses it - sort of the opposite of what the US Department of Commerce has been pushing since, oh, forever. If you PGP encrypt your e-mail, you've just flagged yourself as a weirdo minority with something to hide - guess who goes to the top of the list for further study?
As AC says, this tech has been kicking around - mature - for two decades now. Maybe they're letting it out into broader adoption because they've got cheap PGP cracking capabilities now?
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