GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 206574
PGP options need to be reorganized
Last modified: 2012-01-24 20:49:30 UTC
Right now Evo's PGP options are scattered between two non-intuitive places. They should be centrally located, in an sensible place. Some, such as specifying a Key ID, are in the Mail Settings->Edit Account dialog. This is a bad place for them for multiple reasons, including: a) edit implies changing something that has already been entered, not entering something brand new, and b) these options are separated from the other options that one needs to navigate in order for PGP encryption to work. Others, such as specifying the PGP binary path (which I would very much like to see nixed in favor of evolution finding the path on its own) are hidden in the "Other" tab of the Mail Settings dialog. I would like to see: 1. the security tab removed from the Edit Account dialog. 2. a security tab created in the Mail Settings dialog. 3. all pgp related options moved to this tab. I am attaching a glade file to this bug report which illustrates my solution. A few notes on my glade file: 1. Inside the PGP Keys frame in the mail_accounts_window, the "Define Keys" button should be greyed out until its associated radio button is clicked, and likewise, the Key ID: entry should be greyed out unless its radio button is clicked. By default, the "Use one Key ID for all accounts" radio button should be clicked. 2. I am not wild about my Multiple_Key_IDs dialog. I was going for extreme simplicity and ease-of-implementing in designing it. I'm more or less hoping that it is sufficient for the very small number of people who will need to use it for now. So please, mailer guys, look this stuff over and let me know ASAP what you think.
Created attachment 40112 [details] glade file for pgp reorganization mockup
anna: hrm. I missed this somehow when I was doing triage; should it be 1.0?
Luis: IMHO, yes, it should be 1.0. I encountered significant apathy and recalcitrance from Fejj (who would be the man in charge of implementing this)when I asked him to fix this. I decided that in the interest of picking my battles, I would focus on other broken things, rather than continuing to argue about fixing this. If you feel that it is important and urgent enough to keep trying to get this done by 1.0, then I will support you.
Sorry, I disagree with the poster. PGP-identity (or GPG in my case) belongs to the individual account, not to the global evolution user. It could be argued some of the options are global, but at least for me they are not. The PGP identity, the options for signing and always encrypting to self are all local to an account. Please, do not do as this person asks!
Setting this to 1.1.
Because of the decision to remap 1.1->1.2 and 1.2->1.4, I'm going to be moving a large number of bugs around in the bugzilla. You can just search on 'body contains' 'Because of the decision to remap' and mark all as read. Please direct all questions about this change to evolution@ximian.com, not the bug. Luis
I think something like this makes sense so it has my vote. To Trever, if you look at the glade file, you'll see that multiple keys are handled in the new design. The actual screen for managing the multiple keys is not really complete though. I think it needs a delete button at the very least.
I'd also like to have additional functionality for gnupgp handling. How about including some functions from seahorse, or just start this app from that new menu as well?
what is seahorse? no, we will not be forking/execing yet another program. that is getting a little bit too out of hand. it's bad enough that we have to fork/exec gpg.
seahorse seems to be a dead project, last update (0.5.0 release) made in Feb 2001
Too bad that it is no longer maintained. I'm still using it because the GUI and the handling is very similiar of Evo. Especially the keyring (Screenshot: http://seahorse.sourceforge.net/images/screenshots/seahorse_keymgr.png ) manager is very useful, allowing to set the ownertrust, import and export keys to/from pgp servers. Maybe you could pick up the best source pieces from it? Don't get me wrong. Evolution is a fantastic piece of software and I appreciate very much your excellent work. However PGP needs some improvement. I use it in my daily work and I'd like to tell you some problems I've encountered. I have them sorted in my view of priority: 1.support for sending in-line pgp I do get a lot of complaints of Outlook/Outlook Express users because Evo sends the PGP signatures as attachment. These users have to store the attachments, before being able to verify the signatures. Some of them seem also be irritated by the fact that my mail comes with an attachment and they're looking for a document and wonder what to do with a signature attachment. This would affect the PGP options because you have toggle between Inline / MIME PGP in the account somewhere. See also your bug number 17541. 2. Add PGP key field to adressbook This solves two problems: a) If more than one key for a given user exists, autoselection doesn't know which one to selcet, b) you can select which users are going to receive pgp signed messages and others not. See #19814 too. 3. support for receiving in-line pgp I know, that's very difficult when it comes to HTML and inline PGP. But at the moment I even have to use Mozillas Enigmail plugin to view messages from my contacts that send plain inline PGP. 4. Extract PGP key from a message Just a wish: Should work for inline / PGP mime as well. 5. PGP Mail indicator in message list Wish: Show in the message list a small symbol for encrypted mails. see also #7831.
my gpg library is a whole lot better than the seahorse code. it would be better to extend my gpg lib to do key management than to use seahorse code since then we'd have to sections of code to do similar things. feel free to look into extending my gpg lib by looking at camel-gpg-context.c
Ok this is getting a bit off-track :-) Do we still want to redesign the UI for 1.2, or is it getting too late for that?
too late for that afaik.
adding security keyword to make that searchable again :-)
Apologies for any spam... cc'ing usability-maint on all Evolution usability bugs. Filter on EVO-USABILITY-SPAM to ignore.
closing this. nobody interested. besides - the original proposition isn't a valid one, see comment #4 from Trevor Adams. Key's and such must be associated with individual accounts.