Enigmail Standard In Mandrake 9.0

AxelTorvalds writes "The Mozilla 1.1 RPMs in Mandrake 9.0 contain the enigmail plugin. It seemlessly encrypts, signs, decrypts and authenticate email with GPG or PGP in the Mozilla Mail client. This is the first major distributor I know of to support enigmail. With this and Evolution and Kmail both supporting GPG and PGP are we at the dawn of that golden age when encrypted email will be commonplace?" Update: 09/15 17:26 GMT by T : Borked link fixed.

Comments

Excellent... except

[gmplague]

Excellent, except as I recall, Microsoft Outlook has had this ability since the release of Windows XP... sure it's not GPG and PGP messages, but it's seamless strong encryption. I love mandrake though, and this is a great step. Good work team!

The Golden Age? Nah...

[Arandir]

are we at the dawn of that golden age when encrypted email will be commonplace?

No.

There are still two important pieces missing. Without them the non-geek will not be using encrypted email.

The first is key generation. No matter how simple of a front end you have for it, the user still has to consciously sit down and create a strong key. We all know from experience that the average user will not want to do this.

The second is even more problematic. That's key management. Where is the average user going to store their private keys? On their harddrive or on a floppy disk? And will they be conscientious participants in a web of trust?

So far most proposed methods of automated key management have been detrimental to our privacy (Clipper chip, Passport, etc). But here's one idea: create and market a USB dongle that has a write-once key that is generated during its first use (or the user could initialize it with a preexisting key). Such keys would be automatically signed by the manufacturer. It might not work, but it's something to think about.