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21 years after the request OpenPGP support gets added to Thunderbird

bugzilla.mozilla.org

41–50 of 281 posts

Re: 21 years after the request OpenPGP support gets added to Thunderbird

#41
> For reasons associated with U.S. export restrictions, no cryptographic security of any kind is likely to be included in the original sources

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22687#c1

Creepiest thing with seeing this ticket (again?) is noticing that the first comment is about that is used to be illegal to write anything with cryptographic security in the US and sell/give it to the outside world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

Re: 21 years after the request OpenPGP support gets added to Thunderbird

#42

sigh Thunderbird has so many great features under the hood, but the hood is the biggest issue I have that prevents me from switching full time. Classic and wide layouts are not optimized for wide resolutions in modern laptops. Their vertical layout is unusable. The columns in the list of messages are horizontal, taking up too much width. Each layout is a tradeoff on whether I want to message pane to be usable or the…

Have you tried turning off some of the columns in the message list and using Vertical view? There's an absurd number of them that you really don't need all the time.

Re: 21 years after the request OpenPGP support gets added to Thunderbird

#43

Never seen a timestamp on the web that said "20 years ago". Wow. Reminds me of a tiny blog post I put up years ago about the future of archaeology. Forgive the silly site title. https://meaninglessdreams.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/156/

> This hypothetical archaeologist has it easy

I am not so sure of that. Even time stamps cannot be trusted very much.

For example, a lot of photo cameras, audio recorders and other such devices still don’t have a small extra battery for keeping track of time. So every time you run out of battery, or in the case of wall-connected devices you unplug them from the wall, the clock is reset and time is set to some date that the device manufacturer decided to use as the epoch for their device.

And most of these devices don’t have a GPS receiver in them either, so you need to manually set the time. And only some of them will prompt you for it directly while for others you need to remember this and go in the settings menu and adjust the time.

So I routinely get time stamps that are things like 1st of January 2008, or 2015 or what have you. And sure if you notice right away you can correct it. But even when you know you sometimes get tired of that kind of stuff so you just leave it like it is.

And that’s just at the recording stage. Then you transfer files between systems and sometimes you get the original time on your files and sometimes you don’t, and even if you did they might be wrong in the first place as per above.

And all of this is for someone who knows how this stuff works and who tries as good as they can to have proper dates on files and to keep them that way. Then you have people who don’t know and don’t notice.

And then you have people who willfully modify metadata.

And then there is the data itself. We live in a post-truth age they say.

How do you know in a thousand years that the data is from when it says it was from and furthermore that there is even a grain of truth in the data itself?

I am sure there will be competent historians that are able to learn a bit of our time from our data. But I don’t think they will have it easy.

And on top of that I don’t think data can really tell the future what life today is like. It’s hard to put in words what I mean by this last point so I won’t try to say any more about that.

Re: 21 years after the request OpenPGP support gets added to Thunderbird

#44

> For reasons associated with U.S. export restrictions, no cryptographic security of any kind is likely to be included in the original sources https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22687#c1 Creepiest thing with seeing this ticket (again?) is noticing that the first comment is about that is used to be illegal to write anything with cryptographic security in the US and sell/give it to the outside world. https://…

[deleted]

Re: 21 years after the request OpenPGP support gets added to Thunderbird

#45

sigh Thunderbird has so many great features under the hood, but the hood is the biggest issue I have that prevents me from switching full time. Classic and wide layouts are not optimized for wide resolutions in modern laptops. Their vertical layout is unusable. The columns in the list of messages are horizontal, taking up too much width. Each layout is a tradeoff on whether I want to message pane to be usable or the…

I was never satisfied with their layout either. Always liked the way it behaved though. Ended up switching to Postbox, a Thunderbird fork, about 7 years ago and haven't really looked back. You have to pay for it, but it's a pretty solid email experience for what you pay (I think I paid $40 for a lifetime license a few years ago).

Re: 21 years after the request OpenPGP support gets added to Thunderbird

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty moribund. They got dropped by Mozilla so it's entirely community-driven, and there's only so many things you need to add to an email client, unless you want it to turn into emacs or something. That said it's a damn good product that's damn good at what it does.

There's as many developers working on it now as there were when it was a part of Mozilla.

Are they still paid by Mozilla, though?

Re: 21 years after the request OpenPGP support gets added to Thunderbird

#47

I remember back in the 90s exchanging PGP keys with my roommate to exchange encrypted emails. It was supposed to be so easy. Just 12 simple steps. Every time.

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."

Re: 21 years after the request OpenPGP support gets added to Thunderbird

#48

sigh Thunderbird has so many great features under the hood, but the hood is the biggest issue I have that prevents me from switching full time. Classic and wide layouts are not optimized for wide resolutions in modern laptops. Their vertical layout is unusable. The columns in the list of messages are horizontal, taking up too much width. Each layout is a tradeoff on whether I want to message pane to be usable or the…

Have you tried turning off some of the columns in the message list and using Vertical view? There's an absurd number of them that you really don't need all the time.

I have, but the biggest horizontal space eaters in that view are the most important ones - subject, from, and date. Turning off the others don't really help that much. Besides, Mail.app gives me the all the same information as in Thunderbird's, but the list of messages is rearranged for that view. It doesn't eat into the message plane. Thunderbird's vertical layout is just a re-arrangement of the panes.

Edit: I mixed Vertical and Wide in my original message. I meant the vertical view is unusable. I've edited it.

Re: 21 years after the request OpenPGP support gets added to Thunderbird

#49

Never seen a timestamp on the web that said "20 years ago". Wow. Reminds me of a tiny blog post I put up years ago about the future of archaeology. Forgive the silly site title. https://meaninglessdreams.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/156/

I was born 20 years ago...

Re: 21 years after the request OpenPGP support gets added to Thunderbird

#50
I used to love PGP, but I now think encrypted email is a bad idea. https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted....

Better to use a protocol designed with encryption in mind, like Signal, to get forward secrecy, avoid leaking metadata, and have encryption always on by default.

UPDATE: I have been reminded that PGP does not have to be used with email. I meant to say that I used to love using PGP with email, since that is the primary way I have used it. I will not comment on the use of PGP outside of email, since I haven't carefully examined its use in other contexts.

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