Today I tried EnigMail with Thunderbird for the first time. Basically it's an extension that makes it possible to sign and encrypt/decrypt email messages. I didn't know I had it installed, but appearantly the crypt USE-variable was enabled by default in the Portage tree.
Theoretically, GnuPG, which EnigMail utilizes, is a nice way of verifying that the sender really is the sender of an email. It's also an effective way to make the email unreadable to others by encrypting it and only making it readable to a specific recipient. However, since few people use GnuPG, it's not a very usable extension in practice. Of course, I could sign my mail anyway to verify to the (few) users of GnuPG that I'm really the author of the message, but to everyone else not using GnuPG, they will just see some confusing and sometimes annoying garbage characters like this:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG version X.xx iQA/AwUBO9U1l61jC06tVuW0EQJ76gCfdChJVLprIOAjJUyP1fd3qzxp/AwAnjCM 7gYeqrYPH/y6VktGVqRnz15i =C5/O -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Anyway, when using this special build of Thunderbird with EnigMail enabled, Thunderbird randomly closes itself without any error message or anything. Maybe my GnuPG settings are misconfigured, but I can't have it this way so I'm recompiling Thunderbird without the crypt variable (USE="-crypt" emerge mozilla-thunderbird).
Update: The problem with Thunderbird shutting down was related to one of the mail folders used being write protected. For some reason, the Read Only bit was set on the FAT32 drive which is shared by Windows and Linux.
Posted by djst at January 31, 2005 9:58 PMI have been using Enigmail since Thunderbird 0.7. Never had any problems. One of the best features I found out recently is that it automatically finds the key associated with the mail account you are using automatically :)
However, it was on Debian GNU/Linux :)
Posted by: KDS at February 1, 2005 4:33 AMGnuPG is compatible to pgp. That means, you can exchange mails with pgp users too. S/MIME, the other encryption standard is already built into Thunderbird -- you don't need an extension for that. It might be a good idea to export your public key to one of the public key servers. This way other persons can send you encrypted mail and validate your signed mail without having to ask you for your public key.
For the crash: my TB for OS X plays nicely with enigmail (although the Apple Mail plugin has the better user interface for encryption).
Posted by: daniel. at February 1, 2005 9:18 AMI've been using Thunderbird with enigmail since 0.6 both under windows and linux (debian) which btw is very nice, having only one folders directory both of them accessing it.
But about enigmail+gnupg, no problems, ever, not with any Thunderbird, not with any Enigmail, not under any of the above OS's.
Take care and check your emerge settings, and compile flags, and try again. It should work flawlessly.
Posted by: dp at February 1, 2005 4:52 PMOh, and regarding the gpg message parts showing up at people not using gpg.
1). convince them to use gpg (no joke, doing so myself)
2). use the mime option when sending gpg-signed e-mails, this way most modern e-mail reader applications can easily tell the difference and not display the gpg part (just showing up as an attachment).
Mind you, the latter doesn't work with Outlook & O. Express. I didn't know until some guys using them mentioned. But I don't really care about that: use crap, eat your troubles.
I always wonder why those PGP dudes are putting rubbish in the message's body, as opposed to putting their information in the header, and serving encoded messages as a multipart message or something.
~Grauw
Posted by: Laurens Holst at February 1, 2005 8:04 PM