Re: How do you manage encrypted mail?
----- Original Message -----
> From: "Richard Lawrence" <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu>
>
> Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> writes:
>
> > 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...
> >
> > 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
> >
>
> Ah, this is what I was missing. Thanks!
>
> >> 2) Search. The more serious issue is that I can't search encrypted
> >> email, whether I sent it or received it...
> >
> > Mutt will use gpg to decrypt encrypted mail when searching in the
> > body
> > (ie, when limiting to ~bsomething). It can get slow, indeed.
>
> Good to know, thanks. When I try this, Mutt asks me to enter my GPG
> passphrase for every encrypted message in the folder I'm limiting,
> though! (So it's not a good option for my "sent" folder, for
> example.)
> Any way to avoid that?
>
On my system, Mutt doesn't re-ask me for my GPG passphrase until some
timeout has been reached. 5 minutes, I think. I didn't set it like
that. It was the default. I'm not sure if that's a Mutt setting or a
GPG setting.
Icedove/Thunderbird has the Enigmail extension to handle encryption.
You might want to give that a try as well, particularly since you are
trying to encourage others to use encryption and Thunderbird is available
for both Linux and Windows (and Mac?).
In my experience, email encryption is has been pretty easy with the
exception of getting it to work with webmail. The other tricky thing is
getting people to understand the concepts of how/why to trust a key --
things like verifying the fingerprint, etc.
-Rob
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