Encrypted Email Is Still a Pain in 2017 (incoherency.co.uk)

Bristol-based software developer James Stanley, who used to work at Netcraft, shares how encrypted emails, something which was first introduced over 25 years ago, is still difficult to setup and use for even reasonably tech savvy people. He says he recently tried to install Enigmail, a Thunderbird add-on, but not only things like GPG, PGP, OpenPGP were -- for no reason -- confusing, Enigmail continues to suffer from a bug that takes forever in generating keys. From his blog post: Encrypted email is nothing new (PGP was initially released in 1991 -- 26 years ago!), but it still has a huge barrier to entry for anyone who isn't already familiar with how to use it. I think my experience would have been better if Enigmail had generated keys out-of-the-box, or if (a.) gpg agreed with Enigmail on nomenclature (is it a secring or a private key?) and (b.) output the paths of the files it had generated. My experience would have been a lot worse had I not been able to call on the help of somebody who already knows how to use it.

Comments

Re:mail.app

[TheRaven64]

There's a button in the 'compose email' window to turn it on, and there's online help for how to import a signing cert. Keychain will create a cert for you and a CSR, but it's then up to you to have it signed. The most important part of the grandparent's point is nothing to do with Apple though. Thunderbird also supports S/MIME out of the box, as does Outlook. The author of TFA decided to try two third-party add-ons for encrypting his mail, instead of the industry standard one that's built into the mail client that he was using. He then discovered that it was hard and acted surprised.

Re:Only difficult because computer users are idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay.
But the RSA algorithm is not the same as the ECC algorithm and both were designed by different people.