[BLUG] Meeting presentation idea: OpenPGP/Gnu Privacy Guard

[Steven Black]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 10:58:44AM -0400, Barry Schatz wrote:
> As a rule, I never trust a webmail application to be secure. That said,  
> FireGPG actually looks decent. It doesn't do any actual encryption or  
> decryption itself. You actually need GnuPG installed to do the heavy  
> lifting. FireGPG seems to just detect when you're using Gmail and use  
> GnuPG on the right blocks.

FireGPG allows you to type of text, then encrypt it right in the
webform. It is a nice idea, but...

By the very nature of the product, it can't set the headers right to
indicate that it is actually encrypted. This causes mailers with good
GPG/PGP support (like Mutt) to fail to recognize that it is GPG encoded
without special hacks which sniff the body of the mail message.

It is a solution if you're trapped in webforms and don't have access
to decent mail applications with good GPG support. It isn't a good
solution, though. It actually can make things much more of a pain in the
ass for people who do use mail apps with good GPG support.

(Yes, I use mutt. I can respond to Outlook events, but managing them is
up to me.)

Cheers,
Steven Black