Thunderbird 78.x is great but has issues for advanced PGP users

Re:Thunderbird 78.x is great but has issues for advanced PGP... by gorgoiler on Thursday November 26, 2020 @11:09PM (#25225482)

Imagine HTTPS but where the site name and the URL of the resource were in plaintext and only the body was encrypted. That’s what PGP email feels like.

It’s useful for closed circuits though, where you have a group of correspondents needing to prove their authenticity. One company I use will sign their invoices, for example. I’ve never verified the signatures.

If you need to go to the technical effort of private group communication, running your own webmail service seems a lot easier and a lot more private.

I love PGP for other infra. I love my smartcards. But I can’t remember the last time I’ve used it for email :)

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Re:Thunderbird 78.x is great but has issues for advanced PGP... by gsich on Thursday November 26, 2020 @11:32PM (#25225560)

This is somewhat the case as SNI is unencrypted.

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Re:Thunderbird 78.x is great but has issues for advanced PGP... by BrandoElFollito on Saturday November 28, 2020 @05:12PM (#25240989)

Could you expand on that please? SNI is not the full URL or am I missing something?

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Re:Thunderbird 78.x is great but has issues for advanced PGP... by m-p-3 on Thursday November 26, 2020 @11:48PM (#25225613)

But there's eSNI.

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Re:Thunderbird 78.x is great but has issues for advanced PGP... by thayne on Friday November 27, 2020 @02:26AM (#25226283)

Which is a very new technology, and not widely deployed yet.

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Re:Thunderbird 78.x is great but has issues for advanced PGP... by zaarn on Friday November 27, 2020 @05:08AM (#25227230)

I get about 5k unique visitors from my websites, additional 20k visitors from a community project I'm in. We see about 30 - 40% eSNI Adoption.

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Re:Thunderbird 78.x is great but has issues for advanced PGP... by thayne on Friday November 27, 2020 @12:59PM (#25230990)

And that is just client support. For eSNI to work, both client and server must support it.

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Re:Thunderbird 78.x is great but has issues for advanced PGP... by zaarn on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @07:07AM (#25264494)

Adoption, not support, meaning the clients and server both support it.

I bet most of the non-supporting clients are simply either a bit outdated or had it disabled (probably by the client local AV engine).

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Re:Thunderbird 78.x is great but has issues for advanced PGP... by gsich on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @11:07AM (#25266374)

Unlikely. Since OpenSSL has no support for it (by extension this includes Apache and Nginx) because it's not a standard yet, adoption is very low. Also Chromium and by extension Chrome has no support for it.

Firefox does support a draft, but since Firefox usage numbers are somewhat low depending on what statistic you believe, this amounts to not much.

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Re:Thunderbird 78.x is great but has issues for advanced PGP... by zaarn on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @01:40AM (#25273815)

Well, again, we see about 20-40% eSNI activity based on our connection data, of about 60k monthly users.

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Re:Thunderbird 78.x is great but has issues for advanced PGP... by gsich on Friday December 04, 2020 @07:53PM (#25310476)

Not plausible unless you have a very specific userbase, ie Firefox users mostly.

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Re:Thunderbird 78.x is great but has issues for advanced PGP... by gsich on Friday November 27, 2020 @09:03AM (#25228756)

A draft. OpenSSL devs wait for it to be finished.

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Re:Thunderbird 78.x is great but has issues for advanced PGP... by thayne on Friday November 27, 2020 @02:23AM (#25226267)

Of course the other option with email is that everything is in plaintext...

There are more secure options of course, but none of them are compatible with each other, and the most popular ones are more like instant messaging than email.

I wish there was a secure communication channel similar to email, but as ubiquitous as https.

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Re:Thunderbird 78.x is great but has issues for advanced PGP... by gorgoiler on Friday November 27, 2020 @03:44PM (#25232419)

True. But mostly I’m cool knowing that I delivered over TLS.

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