Thunderbird Announces OpenPGP Support

doconnor writes: On the Mozilla Thunderbird blog it was announced that for the future Thunderbird 78 release, planned for summer 2020, they will add built-in functionality for email encryption and digital signatures using the OpenPGP standard. This addresses a feature request opened on Bugzilla almost 20 years ago and has been one of the top voted bugs for most of that period.

Noone Ever Heard of Enigmail?

[BeerFartMoron]

This addresses a feature request opened on Bugzilla almost 20 years ago and has been one of the top voted bugs for most of that period.

20 years?!? Dudes, https://enigmail.net/index.php/en/ [enigmail.net]

What is Enigmail?

Enigmail is a seamlessly integrated security add-on for Mozilla Thunderbird and Postbox. It allows you to use OpenPGP to encrypt and digitally sign your emails and to decrypt and verify messages you receive.

Enigmail is free software. It can be freely used, modified and distributed under the terms of the Mozilla Public License.

Re:Noone Ever Heard of Enigmail?

[OverlordQ]

The only reason Enigmail was a thing was because Mozilla took 20 years to add the functionality.

Re:

[BeerFartMoron]

Enigmail was a thing when the feature request was only two years old.

3/15/2001 Initial source/XPI files created

Not everyone sat on their thumbs for the next 18 years.

Don't Give Mozilla Any Credit For This

[HannethCom]

It didn't take Mozilla 20 years to add OpenPGP, it took independent developers years after Mozilla left Thunderbird out to dry to add it. Mozilla only made things harder by constantly changing the interfaces and features Gecko has.

Re:Noone Ever Heard of Enigmail?

[doconnor]

Enigmail will no longer be supported in the future Thunderbird releases because of API changes.

Re:Noone Ever Heard of Enigmail?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Enigmail is a seamlessly integrated security add-on for Mozilla Thunderbird and Postbox. It allows you to use OpenPGP to encrypt and digitally sign your emails and to decrypt and verify messages you receive.

Enigmail is free software. It can be freely used, modified and distributed under the terms of the Mozilla Public License

Enigmail will no longer be supported in the future Thunderbird releases because of API changes.

Let's see...
  - Thunderbird hasn't had built-in support for OpenPGP, though it's been on the to-do list for 20 years.
  - But there has been this "seamlessly integrated" Enigmail add-on that provides the requested support.
  - Now they are doing something that will break the interface used by the add-on.
  - And losing the add-on means a large part of their user base won't be able to use OpenPGP with the newer-and-improveder Thunderbird.
  - But they happen to chose this same release to implement the 20 year old feature request that Enigmail covered for them. Which happens to serve exactly those users who otherwise would be left without built-in encrypted mail.

What a coincidence! B-)

Re: Noone Ever Heard of Enigmail?

[bill_mcgonigle]

And now we get to re-experience the same class of bugs Enigmail fixed in 2006 all over again.

Woot

[AndyKron]

5..4..3..2..1.....Thunderbird is GO!

It's about time

[CaptAubrey]

Using the protonmail web client was getting old.

Re: It's about time

[weilawei]

I've been happily using the ProtonMail bridge.

Re:

[darkmeridian]

Have you tried the FlowCrypt plugin for Gmail? The problem is that there is no stable mobile access.

Meh.

[stavrica]

It doesn't have to be hard.

Or painful.

The best PGP tutorial for Mac OS X, ever [jerzygangi.com]

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

GPGTools started charging for using their software about a year ago. Speaking as a long-time (and now former) user... given how often it is broken, I don’t know why anyone would want to pay for it.

2002

[110010001000]

This makes me feel like it is 2002. OpenPGP? Thunderbird? The ship has sailed on all of that. Too late and no one cared even back then.

Re:

[sremick]

Troll much?

Tons of people use Thunderbird. I can't count even just the number of regular non-techie people I know who do, there are so many. Just because you don't or have some personal beef with the Mozilla foundation doesn't change that. It's not only superior to any other free email client out there, it's also cross-platform. Certainly beats the pants off from Apple Mail or Windows Mail.

Re:

[zidium]

I honestly don't know a single person who uses Thunderbird.

Re:

[DarkRookie2]

Same. I have always seen Outlook or Outlook Express/Whatever they call it in Win 10.

Re:

[evil_aaronm]

I've been using Thunderbird daily since 3/15/06. That's my oldest message, at least.

Re:

[tsa]

I've been using it ever since it was called the Firebird suite or something, after Netscape became open source software.

Re:

[fluffernutter]

If you don't want to pay for Office/Outlook what else is there to use?

What's changed since 2002?

[Anonymous Coward]

The ship has sailed on all of that.

Huh? They might be old, but they're also the latest and greatest. Nothing ever replaced 'em. If you're not doing OpenPGP yet, then you're doing something worse/older.

And while I'm not a huge fan of T-bird, it's at least cross-platform so it's one of the few decent mailreaders available at work.

2019

[p51d007]

I've used thunderbird for my work email, since, well it seems like forever. I get tons of mail on my work laptop. At home, I just use a webclient to access email, because I don't get much these days.

Oh, cool!

[ottdmk]

It's not going to be enough to make me switch from KMail (which has had excellent gnupg integration for ages now) but I occasionally use a PortableApps.com USB stick on Windows and it'll be nice there.

Re:

[HiThere]

Is Kmail working again? When it worked I really liked it, but it seems that frequently it broke, taking the ability to easily read the mail I'd received with it. (I could still read the raw data files, but finding something in that mess wasn't easy.)

I may be non-standard, because I have over 100 (the number varies) local folders (Thunderbird terminology). So that may be why kmail didn't like me.

Re:

[ottdmk]

I can't say I have your interesting local folder structure, but I've had very few difficulties with KMail over the past few years. For me, it just works.

Meh.

[DarkRookie2]

I will stick with the web client or Outlook.
This has the same interface issues that the current Firefox has and does nothing more than the web client. Also, Outlook is much better laid out than this.

Open Source

[Areyoukiddingme]

With many eyes, all bugs are shallow. Feature requests can go die in a fire though.

Re:

[Mononymous]

The point of free licenses is that it's legal for absolutely anyone to change the code. If you want a feature, you can pay someone to add it. It's illegal to do that with proprietary software.

Argh. They rolled their own file format.

[Mike Van Pelt]

It isn't going to be able to use your existing gpg key files. You will have to export your keys from gpg in order to import them into Enigmabird.

Thankless Work

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

That bug history was one of the more painful things I've read recently.

User: I want a thing!
Damon: Have a thing!
devTeam: Two years of bickering and bikeshedding
Damon: FFS. Peace, y'all.
devTeam: 15 years of dithering and hand-wringing
SomeoneElse: Okay, enough waiting. Here's a competing solution that doesn't need upstream buy-in
devTeam: 4 years of drumroll...
devTeam: HAVE A THING! (are you still alive, User?)

FreeBSD recently went through this with getting a recent build of .net ported over. A college student got Google Summer of Code to do the port, actually got it working and got some level of assurance from the .net team that a clean patch would get some level of platform support. Then one of the FreeBSD ports reviewers crapped all over him not using the ports system completely properly. In the time it took to make those folks happy, Microsoft released a new version, making the patches stale. Since FreeBSD didn't get supported in time, they were left in the dust.

I've worked with enough cowboy coders to appreciate needing to meet a certain standard before check-in, but it's always tragic to watch someone do 90+% of the work only to be shut down over relatively insignificant stuff. It's the end-user who loses out. FreeBSD users still don't have an up-to-date .net for hosting services (apart from Mono, which is always chasing a moving target), but at least Thunderbird users finally got PGP. Yay?

Re:

[Waccoon]

Constant pigeonholing is why I gave up on contributing to other peoples' open source projects. It's one thing to reject a patch because it sucks, but I won't waste my time over their political and bureaucratic bickering.

Re:

[ledow]

Pretty much sums up every open-source project I've ever used.

Though, to be fair, closed-source projects are no better. I've had tickets in for years with niche software vendors that cater exclusively to our market, vie for our business all the time, make a lot of money from us, and we ask for a small, niche featurette (and I'm a programmer so I know the difference between asking for the world, and "could you just make your report sort by name") and it just lingers forever and is never resolved.

In some case

Other 19-year old bugs

[jabberw0k]

Would be nice if other almost-twenty-year-old bugs could be addressed, like writing to LDAP address-books [mozilla.org]. At this rate, it might be another few centuries...

Re:

[coofercat]

...or a calendar that actually works properly :-(

Now we just need to get Microsoft Outlook to suppo

[HighPerformanceCoder]

Now we just need to get Microsoft Outlook to support it. I'm sure that has been the single reason why we haven't had encrypted and signed emails in those 20 years,