OpenPGP for application developers

Posted Dec 14, 2023 15:20 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: OpenPGP for application developers by LtWorf
Parent article: OpenPGP for application developers

But that then becomes painful in the current world, where a majority of my contacts do not use PGP - so I'd not turn on "encrypt by default" because that will train me to ignore the prompt.

OpenPGP for application developers

Posted Dec 14, 2023 23:01 UTC (Thu) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (1 responses)

What is your complaint exactly? You are complaining about A ∧ ¬A.

If your requirements negate themselves, yes, no solution can be found.

OpenPGP for application developers

Posted Dec 15, 2023 10:54 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

No I'm not - I'm complaining that I can't have both of the following:

When I reply to, or forward, an encrypted mail, I am prompted if I add a recipient for whom my client neither has, nor can trivially obtain, a key to maintain encryption.
When I write a new mail, or operate on an existing unencrypted mail, I am never prompted about encryption.

These are not in conflict - they are starting from different points (do I have previously encrypted content or not?). Other systems handle this by being purely encrypted, so there's never an issue with recipients for whom you don't have a key - in order to communicate with someone at all, you must have a key.