Kmail and PGP/MIME [LWN.net]

Kmail and PGP/MIME

Posted Jul 20, 2004 4:58 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor, graphical mail clients, and GPG

I agree that the steps to make Kmail work with PGP/MIME are daunting.
However, it's less daunting to make the receiving side work than the
sending side. So right now I have Kmail configured to understand any PGP
mail sent to me, whether it's inline or MIME, but I can only send inline.
(The problem with sending boils down to entering the passphrase through a
gpg-agent that hadn't actually been released yet last I checked, and
wouldn't be very convenient to use anyway.)

I'm very much looking forward to PGP/MIME support (both sending and
receiving) being built into Kmail rather than being an add-on.

(Log in to post comments)

Kmail and PGP/MIME

Posted Jul 20, 2004 20:42 UTC (Tue) by dd9jn (subscriber, #4459) [Link]

You are right, the installation of the gnupg 2 line of code (gnupg-1.9 will eventually end up as gnupg 2) is not as easy as the standard gpg. One problem seems to be that I have been pretty conservative and flagged the gnupg 1.9 branch as "experimental". This is not really the truth but more a consession for the 1.2 branch (tagged "stable") and the 1.3 branch (tagged "development"). A suggestion for a better tag is welcome.

gnupg 1.9 is really usable and part of the EPROSS release done by the German BSI (they need the S/MIME part of it). One thing which is not yet really stable is the gpg part (i.e. the classic OpenPGP) of gnupg-1.9 - however it gets installed as gpg2 and will peacefully coexists with any other gpg.

Even old gpgs (1.2.4 or 1.3.6) can make use of the gpg-agent. Given the problems people have with it, today I added a new configure option to allow building just the agent. I hope this will make it easier for distributions to package just gpg-agent so that all gpg aware tools can make use of the passphrase caching and don't need to care about the passphrase dialog at all.

I am convinced that the recent work done at the CVS Kmail will result in an outstanding support for PGP/MIME, that old inline PGP and S/MIME.

Kmail and PGP/MIME

Posted Jul 24, 2004 10:33 UTC (Sat) by jmayer (subscriber, #595) [Link]

Well, things become even less daunting if your vendor does a proper job:
I'm running Suse 9.1 and they added the plugins already. Now, that's quite
easy to install :) So what I'd have liked to see would have been not just
an
'n' in that table but, where applicable of course, a 'n(y)' for those who
have the plugins installed. It would have resulted in a fairer comparison,
given that Thunderbird was rated with extensions - where I'd like to see a
'n(y)' as well, btw.