encrypt the sent folder

Robert J. Hansen rjh at sixdemonbag.org
Tue Dec 5 21:52:56 CET 2006


David Shaw wrote:
> I must disagree with this.  OpenPGP is not solely a wire protocol.

I probably should have said 'primarily'.  It wasn't my intent to give
the impression it was exclusively a wire protocol.

> The nice thing about using OpenPGP as an archival primitive is that
> each encrypted file is its own file and decrypting one does not impact
> any others.  This works well in the context of email, where each mail
> is its own object.

In other ways it doesn't work very well, since each email is encrypted
separately, requiring complex bignum math for each decryption.
Searching through large numbers of emails could potentially be very
problematic.

Compare this to an encrypted filesystem, which is typically much more
performance-friendly.




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