GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 204091
need armored/inline PGP/GPG encryption option
Last modified: 2004-05-19 15:38:14 UTC
While trying to send GPG (v 1.0.6) signed/encrypted messages from Evolution (and test receiving w/ MS Outlook), it appears that the resulting message from Evolution always includes two attachments (w/ names ATT000??.dat). One appears to be the binary encrypted message, the other appears to be my signature. MS Outlook (w/ PGPFreeware v 6.5.8) is unable to decode the message from Evolution. By contrast, when I send a signed/encrypted message from Outlook and receive with another client, the message is ASCII and inline, and can easily be decrypted by anything (Evolution, mutt, whatever). Is it possible to include an option in Evolution to enable 'armored' (ASCII) inline PGP/GPG messages? Thanks.
OK -- so I read RFC 2015 (PGP/MIME). Looks like Evolution *is* in fact compliant with the standard and MS Outlook & friends are not... <sigh> how surprising. So anyway... would it be too much to ask for an "MS Outlook compatibility hack" button to allow a "text/plain" MIME of the PGP armored data? I understand Evolution is already on the "right side" of the fence here -- but this incompatibility is not helping me evangalize open source solutions to people stuck in the MS world, and it seems like it would be such an easy feature to add...
it would *not* be an easy feature to add, so no. I hacked support so we could receive broken pgp encrypted/signed messages but will not be adding support to send them. The problem with inline pgp is that you can only sign/encrypt the message body and not any of the attachments. One of the biggest problems I see with inline pgp encryption is that the recipient client has no way of knowing what has been encrypted, it has to *assume* it's plain text when in reality it could be a jpeg for all the recipient knows. This can cause security problems.
*** bug 207519 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
How disappointing. WONTFIX on a prominent interoperability bug. The workaround for Outlook users is straightforward but combersome. Copy the ASCII stuff found inside the attachment to the clipboard, paste to a Notepad and save as FOO.ASC, then decrypt the armored file. PGPtools from McAfee's distribution can simplify this, it can decrypt/verify from the clipboard, if you suspect it's a text payload and not some binary payload like a JPG image.
Well, as I understand it, the problem is with PGPFreeware, not Outlook per se. This means 1) if possible, you could try a different PGP plugin (although certainly I could see how this might not be possible) and 2) you could try badgering the authors of PGPFreeware and have a hope of getting them to fix the problem.
you might want to update your bookmarks to point to bug#217541 I think.
I'm not very glad about this end, even if I do not support the sideways of Microsoft applications. I'm afraid Evolution will decrease it's user community by closing this issue as WONTFIX (I know this is not a real bug). Many users -stuck- with MS Outlook an -won't- leave it and many other users have to interoperate with them. The current behaviour of Evolution makes it impractical to exchange PGP encrypted mails with Outlook! Why do you not want to make a special security/PGP option to activate the interoperability with Outlook in Ximain Evolution? You may mark it as "not compliant with RFC" or other ironic comments, but I know users that would thank you for that. At least more users than those which reported or commented this point.
Hey, I don't know if this is a dead horse or not, but this problem makes PGP entirely unuseable for me within my organization. I can't change the way other people operate right now. mutt implements pgp_outlook_compat specifically for this problem. I just don't see us as having the market leverage right now to change other's behavior, so why can't we at least have a temporary hack to make evolution/connector interoperable with outlook/exchange, which I thought was one of the major driving forces behind the project?