Re: [Geary] GPG/OpenPGP support

[Robert Schroll <rschroll gmail com>]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.  I'll try to summarize this, and any 
others that come in, on the bug report.  It sounds like PGP/MIME is the 
de facto standard that we should aim for right now.  Just having one to 
worry about eliminates a lot of the complexity I was worrying about.

On Sat, Jan 31, 2015 at 7:47 AM, J. R. Schmid <jrs weitnahbei de> wrote:
> > How do we do that with servers that automatically populate your sent 
> > mail for you?
> I'm not sure if I understand what you mean? Are we talking about 
> something other than IMAP? I.e. whatever client application is used,  
>    sent mails go to the sent folder. So if there's a mail in the sent 
> folder and you can detect that it's encrypted and you have all you 
> need to decrypt it, then decrypt it. It seems I'm missing something 
> here...

The problem I see is that the emails you send are encrypted with your 
recipient's key, so you can't decrypt them.  Some providers, like 
Gmail, automatically put everything you send out through their SMTP 
server into your "Sent mail" folder.  We could try to detect that, and 
replace it with an unencrypted email, or one encrypted with your public 
key, but this is starting to get scary....

> That said, in my opinion you're answering your own question since 
> noone has any say in what mail provider their recipients choose (or 
> don't choose!) to choose.

But you also don't have a say in whether your recipient posts your 
plaintext to reddit. :)

Thanks again for the info.  I can't promise any timeline on this, but 
the better we can define the problem now, the easier it'll be for 
someone to implement the solution.

Robert