Future OpenPGP Support in Thunderbird

Patrick Brunschwig patrick at enigmail.net
Sun Oct 13 18:04:32 CEST 2019


Werner Koch via Gnupg-users wrote on 13.10.2019 11:56:
> On Sat, 12 Oct 2019 12:43, Chris Narkiewicz said:
> 
>> Do you know why they resited OpenPGP adoption it so much?
> 
> iirc, they said that they want to support only one protocol and settled
> for S/MIME.  This still did not explain why they rejected our proposal
> to clean up their S/MIME code and implement missing stuff so that TB
> could be used for tasks of the German administrative and to be
> compatible with a wider range of S/MIME implementations.  The plan was
> to do that all within TB and without external dependencies.

I think there are two reasons why TB changed their minds:
1. there are different people working on Thunderbird than years ago.
2. in the past, TB was a direct part of Mozilla. Now, Thunderbird is an
independent organization under the umbrella of the Mozilla Foundation,
with an independent council and their own independent financial income
stream.

These two factors lead to a completely different mindset towards what is
good for TB.

-Patrick



More information about the Gnupg-users mailing list