Comment by mapgrep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mapgrep | Hacker News Reader

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The very first step, assuming you already have an email account, for all platform pages:

>INSTALL THE ENIGMAIL PLUGIN FOR YOUR EMAIL PROGRAM

I Googled Enigmail as I was not familiar with it. It is "a security extension to Mozilla Thunderbird and Seamonkey." This seems incredibly shortsighted. Tons of people out there are on Outlook, Apple Mail, Gmail, etc. and not interested in Thunderbird.

There are other options, for example the surprisingly EXCELLENT gpgtools.org installer for Mac, which makes it super-easy to add signing and encrypt/decrypt and key management to OS X and Apple Mail. A quick Google reveals the nicely packaged gpg4win.org (I haven't used it). There's also Google's new Gmail GPG plugin (although yes it's beta) https://code.google.com/p/end-to-end/

I know this is the FSF, but I'd hope in the interest of defeating the surveillance state they could set aside dogma.

(Also, that page shouldn't default to the Linux options when I'm visiting from a Mac browser.)

GPGMail for OS X (what you recommended here) works quite well, and I recommend it too. That team also does a good job of keeping up with Mail.app versions (which is a hard job).

I found the GPG tools on Mac quite good as well.

But I thought I'd do things the "right" way. Use master/sub keys, linked identities, with masters kept offline... The friction was _immense_, especially managing the identities, mucking with the keyring files, then deleting the master key from the online keyring, and so on.

I still have my off-site db secure, but I don't look forward at all to opening it again. I don't want to remember the precise series of steps involved before everything worked correctly.

How can I solve this? I just want to manage a few identities (personal, as a citizen, work account, "stuff", etc.), some of them trusting each other.

Common sense makes me think I'm way over-complicating. But I was always told that any other way wouldn't really be secure. I though I would just be very pro-active with key revocation and that would eliminate most of the problem...

Outlook, Mail, and Gmail aren't Free Software. The FSF post isn't short sighted, it's principled.

Neither are OS X and Windows, yet they have their own sections.

This guide is geared towards Web of Trust. I think most Email clients implement PKI functionality in one way or another. I've tried to set up Outlook with gpg4win (in a business environment) to work with WoT and it wasn't fun, although definitely not impossible. The easy way to solve any problems I had was to switch everybody to Thunderbird.

But again, that's because I wanted to use WoT. If you want PKI, no need to install anything.

GPGMail might be excellent for you, but it do not support my system. Why are you complaining that FSF have chosen to write a guide that works on any operative system, rather than a guide exclusive to one? If the goal is to "fight for computer user's rights, and promote the development of free (as in freedom) software like GnuPG", then writing about a OS X only program does not sound consistent with their goals.

Apple mail also already support encrypting and signing mail (https://support.apple.com/kb/PH11790). In the interest of defeating the surveillance state, one might start by fixing mail programs that do not already natively support encryption?

There's also Mailvelope[1], if you use gmail or other webmail.

[1]: https://www.mailvelope.com/

Reminds me of an article I saw the other day from a guy who ran his own mail server realizing Google already has most of his email, even though he didn't have a Google account, because senders and/or recipients other than himself used Gmail.

You mean this one: (http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-bec...)?

Yes, that is the one. I really need some sort of indexing/full text search through pages I visit

For outlook users there's gpgOL and Outlook Privacy Plugin.

Both have massive problems and are unstable though :(

For future readers, I found that after installing gpgOL Outlook then refused to start (and I had the same problems on multiple computers). Outlook Privacy Plugin works but has some bugs (it's still massively in beta) and the author seems responsive to bug requests posted on the github page.

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