Richard Lawrence wrote: > I've recently (re-)decided to make an effort to use PGP, and to convince > others to use it too. (My effort to do so: > http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~rwl/encryption.html, linked from my > .signature. Comments welcome.) But I've run into a couple of problems > fairly quickly. If you use PGP regularly, how do you solve them? > > 1) Reading encrypted mail that I sent. If I need to remind myself what I > said to someone, or recover an attachment, etc., I can't, because the > only copy of my message is encrypted with the recipient's public key. I > could work around this by Bcc'ing myself on every message, but that > would have the mildly annoying effect of duplicating all my outgoing > messages; every time I were to look for a message I sent to Mr. X, I'd > get two results, and I'd have to figure out which one was encrypted with > my key to read it. Typically, gpg is configured to encrypt mail to multiple recipients, which includes everyone the mail is sent to, as well as the sender. For example, I have in my gpg.conf: # Encrypt stuff to my key too. encrypt-to 2512E3C7 > 2) Search. The more serious issue is that I can't search encrypted > email, whether I sent it or received it. It is conceivably possible to > search mail encrypted with my public key by decrypting it before running > the search (though not encrypted mail that I sent, pending a good > solution to problem 1). However, that seems like it would be extremely > slow in practice, and I am not aware of any software that would make > this simple or practical. Mutt will use gpg to decrypt encrypted mail when searching in the body (ie, when limiting to ~bsomething). It can get slow, indeed. I rarely find the need to search in bodies of mail after it's a month old, and use mairix to index and search subject and other headers, which are not encrypted. Then if necessary I can load the resulting mbox full of search results into mutt and do a body search to further refine it down to what I was looking for. -- see shy jo
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