PGP in Thunderbird

Published
by
John Griffin
on May 29, 2005
in Tech
.

mozilla.gifMatt is moaning about Thunderbird’s support for PGP. Ok firstly that chat log was dated back from 2001 before Thunderbird even existed and secondly there is an excellent extension with full GnuPG/OpenPGP support available called Enigmail (since 3/15/2001). Get off your high horse and search on Google before bashing outstanding open source projects like this. Please, I encourage you to use Outlook Express and enjoy the pleasures of a bug ridden, virus laden and highly exploitable pile of crap.

2 Responses to “PGP in Thunderbird”

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  1. 1 Matt
    May 29, 2005 at 10:07 pm

    Well actually I had seen Enigmail, but you’re missing the point. I *want* to use Thunderbird, the point is (given, I didnt make it at all well) that this still hadn’t changed. Four years - nothing…

    Indeed PGP 9.0 tries to ’secure’ my email account, it’s autodetected that I’m using a POP3 account and even all my settings, but yet still nothing.

    I’m actually toying (as I told you the other day) with having a ’secure’ box running Ubuntu and using that for things like PGP mail and Internet banking now I have almost ten different accounts that use this method.

    I did search, a whole ten minutes around Google and even the Mozilla Search page (powered by Google). Granted that isn’t a huge time investmnet, but I’d like to see some statistics around how long people do search for. Much beyong page two of a Google search? I doubt it.

  2. 2 johng
    May 29, 2005 at 10:26 pm

    Your post sounded very negative on the project and it appeared you had taken one look at the chat log and denounced it as PGP incompatible.

    You can use the OpenPGP keymanager (http://enigmail.mozdev.org/keyman.html) or import your PGP key from PGP 9 to get it to work.

    Don’t expect PGP 9 to magically scan your system for all mail clients, find them and install everything. PGP 9 only supports Outlook out of the box, you want more, you have to install a few things.

    So it’s PGP’s fault for not providing an extension, not the Mozilla Foundation’s. It wouldn’t be much work for PGP to develop it (well documented, great community) but as they are corporate solution most of their customers use Outlook\Exchange so they leave it to others to fill their gaps.

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