Some thoughts on the future of OpenPGP and GnuPG

[Werner Koch]

On Tue,  2 Jul 2019 20:41, angel at pgp.16bits.net said:

> attachments that you need to extract, then open with a special program
> to decrypt.
> (In fact, many people _currently_ use OpenPGP in that stony age way)

From my experience many people use ZIP or PDF encryption here and not
OpenPGP.  But anyway we do not have any real numbers on that and thus we
can't tell for sure.  Agreed, copy and pasting armored gpg messages is
often a very useful thing in particular with chats and fora.

> But then, it needs to work in Microsoft Outlook. Or in Lotus.

We like to hear about problem you experience with Gpg4win and Outlook
with and without Exchange.  A few minor bugs are known but most users
tells us that it works pretty well, be it OpenPGP or S/MIME.  The user
interface of GpgOL (The outlook plugin from Gpg4win) for encryption is
even more advanced than Outlook's internal S/MIME encryption.

> The big deal are email clients. And there you would have all the issues
> that existing implementations have. Plus those they have fixed.

Right, and most faults you have seen in recent years are due to bad
integration of crypto in MUAs.  It used to be better when we started to
integrate encryption into MUAs about 20 years ago but meanwhile nifty
UIs and featurism seems to be more important than solid integration.


Salam-Shalom,

   Werner

-- 
Die Gedanken sind frei.  Ausnahmen regelt ein Bundesgesetz.
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