Frustration about Thunderbird version 78 and its junk PGP implementation...
This is less of a question, but more a try to reach to the people that program Thunderbird and implemented PGP of TB 78, and at the same time disabled the more or less decent (by far not perfect, but decent at least) Enigmail plugin. I must say, I'm very unhappy that PGP that does NOT allow you to encrypt a mail with less PGP keys than there are recipients, or with a PGP key that does not match perfectly the recipient E-mail... Nothing against a warning, but you make it IMPOSSIBLE to override this. Are you aware of how many people have PGP keys they use for several mail accounts? That share official group PGP keys among several people? How many E-mail lists there are that have exactly one list E-mail address to send messages to that are then distributed to several members and so must be encrypted with all of their public PGP keys, even if there is only one mailing list address that it is sent to? I'm not even speaking about the lack of PGP encryption rules here, which of course Enigmail could do and your plugin cannot; this is painful enough, but I could live without it.
Well I see on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1644085 that finally - after months - movement came into this, which is good... I would have removed my posting here if I could (but obviously I can only edit it, alas), at least some first good movement. And yes, a json config sounds good, but I'll have to see it first before finally upgrading. Remains me to ask you to take care of your customers.
Andy
Modified by mail869
All Replies (2)
The choice was implement this and have no enigmail, or have nothing as enigmail would but have been able to be rewritten to work with 78. The release of 78 was delayed 2 months to get what had been implemented complete enough to release. Personally I am against the implementation in it's entirety. There are more important things the developers should have been doing, but the P=P foundation funded a lot of it I think. Details are very sketchy, but they were paying for one employee.
I personally see encryption to one and not all members of a mailing simply insane....nothing like putting a plain text copy of what you are encrypting out there for everyone to read. What is the point? It negates the whole encryption thing. But it appears to be something of a poster child for the PGP community.
Personally I would have liked to see a profile import export function that would have benefited everyone. PGP has added nothing to Thunderbird for me. I use s/mime. and it has added nothing for the 98% that do not use encryption.
If you had read Introduction to End-to-end encryption in Thunderbird you would be aware there is an e2ee mailing list. I suggest join it is you wish to discuss e2ee encryption as you clearly are not seeking any support. https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/e2ee Before you post, you might want to appraise your self of some of the earlier discussion.
i'm also not happy with immature or limited functional implementation of RNP based OpenPGP in v78 series TB.
Thunderbird = TB.
users may have to use a v68 series (v68.12.1) TB as SECOND TB which supports Enigmail, GPG based OpenPGP, etc, and have more mature implementation.
v78 series TB needs more time to catch-up.
Get OLDER/newer Thunderbird(TB) Version:
Below sites contain installer program, integrity-code (hash/checksum) files, etc for different versions and for different languages & localities:
• Thunderbird v68.12.1: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/releases/68.12.1/
• Thunderbird other versions: https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/releases/
• Thunderbird stable+latest release: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/all/
Portable Editions of TB, for Windows, To Use As Second TB: • Portable Thunderbird Legacy (v68)(v68.12.1) • Portable Thunderbird (Latest version)
Second TB in Linux/Unix/macOS: these OS allows to install second or multiple TB in a different folder location.