Re: [Evolution] Decryption & Signing - Version 1.2.0

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

On Thu, 2002-11-21 at 20:06, Ian Scott wrote:
> I've just upgraded to 1.2.0 and have come across some strange behaviour
> with respect to encryption and signed messages.
>
> 1.  When I receive encrypted email sent from something other than
> Evolution, I am no longer asked for my passphrase - rather, the message
> opens with the message still encrypted, and the only way to decrypt it
> is to copy paste into a file and run gpg manually.  
>
> Oddly, when I send myself some encrypted email with Evolution, Evo
> presents me with the passphrase box, and after successfully entering,
> the message is decrypted.
>
> 2.  With the previous version of Evolution, signed messages all arrived,
> with the digital signature as an attachment, even when digitally signed
> in-line.  Or at least, that's what the behaviour seemed to be.  However,
> I am now finding an inconsistent display of digitally signed messages,
> some are in-line, some are attachments displaying the lock icon.
>
> 3.  Not totally related to the above, and I understand there are
> numerous messages in the archives about this, but it concerns me that
> using Evolution to encrypt email and sign it is incompatible with a huge
> number of other email applications because of the differences in
> PGP/MIME and S/MIME.  Is there a search function for the archives?  I'm
> trying very hard to understand the point of view of the Evo developers -
> but with so many incompatibilities, I'm not fully satisfied I understand
> the reasoning why Evo does not seem to work as far as decryption/signing
> with so many other email applications.  It's a real pain in the butt for
> users of Kmail, Outlook, and almost any other MUA to receive encrypted
> or signed email from me when using Evolution.  I love Evolution.. except
> this one issue is a real pain!

Evolution only supports PGP/MIME currently, S/MIME is planned but is a
LOT of work to do. Also, I think Mozilla is the only client on Linux to
even support it currently. The German Government is supposedly putting a
lot of effort into writing support for mutt to do S/MIME but so far no
one has offered to do that for us :-(

We plan on trying to use the Mozilla security libraries to implement
S/MIME (or at least, that's what I had started to implement S/MIME in
for Evolution a year and a half ago or so but stopped because their
library interfaces kept changing).

Even using the Mozilla nss libraries, it will take probably a good 6
months to a year to implement and we just don't have the resources
currently. There are more important things to do...

There have been a few people that have volunteered to work on it, but
they have all gone incommunicado.

Jeff

-- 
Jeffrey Stedfast
Evolution Hacker - Ximian, Inc.
fejj ximian com  - www.ximian.com