It's the end of 2019 and there still is no decent, usable, #PGP-enabled e-mail client that I could roll-out to regular, non tech-savvy users without feeling bad.
10 years ago that would have been #KMail. But KMail shot itself in the foot, knee, and hip with Akonadi.
#Thunderbird is... Thunderbird.
#Mailpile doesn't do writes to IMAP, so you either use *only* it, or not use it at all.
#Kube just crashed on me because I tried to reply to a signed e-mail.
Anybody any other suggestions?
@rysiek I can't help feel defeatist about email security given that it seems like a more viable option to store local maildir as an encrypted loopback file and then create a local MTA proxy that just buffers up outbound and inbound mail until you unlock your gpg-agent and then uses it to attempt to transparently encrypt and decrypt and use whatever MUA on unencrypted local maildir :/
@grimmware you're *almost* describing kuvert. That's how our infrastructure send signed and often encrypted e-mails from our services:
https://www.snafu.priv.at/mystuff/kuvert/
Fun fact, the "mustencrypt" option was added after we explicitly asked for it. 👍
I should really blog about how we use kuvert to encrypt outgoing automatic mail from our infrastructure; and how we use Schleuder3, offlineimap, and opensmtpd to have encrypted e-mail groups.
Before I do this, here's some stuff I dockerized for this:
https://github.com/occrp/kuvert
https://0xacab.org/schleuder/schleuder/
https://git.occrp.org/libre/schlocker-compose
https://git.occrp.org/libre/docker-opensmtpd
https://github.com/occrp/docker-offlineimap
@rysiek I used offlineimap for quite some time but found that it could sometimes get wedged due to intermittent connectivity so I switched to mbsync.
My use case was being able to do maildir-based email over a cell connection though... I wrote a daemon in golang to handle it all (testing for connectivity, fetching mail, flushing my msmtp mail queue) because apparently I like overcomplicating my life for the sake of the 3 minutes a year where I want to read my mail on my laptop on the tube.
@rysiek holy fucking shit the amount of my life that I've dedicated to my mail setup it makes no sense.
@kensanata @grimmware @rysiek no doubt a big portion of that is connected to the spam fight, & the collateral damage from incompetent admins using #spamhaus w/reckless disregard.
@resist1984 @kensanata @rysiek Oh good lord I stopped even trying to maintain my own MX ages ago because of all this nonsense (more power to everyone who stuck it out!) - I've managed to waste most of my time client-side - offline outbound queue, IMAP->maildir syncing, and PGP hygiene (which I've also sacked off).
Ever get the feeling that you're keeping a very old federated service limping along?
@grimmware @rysiek @kensanata I took the hard-ass approach b/c I felt that by complying with corporate greed and control I then become a supporter of it. Refusing to be part of the problem means running my own MX & refusing to correspond w/ @gmail and @outlook users. I've become a heavy fax user as a result. Fax is much more reliable than email.
@resist1984 @grimmware @kensanata
"Fax is much more reliable than email."
...words seldom uttered. But I get your point.
@rysiek
Why Fax is more reliable than #Email
@resist1984 @rysiek @grimmware @kensanata Have you actually used a fax over an analog phone line? If not, you can emulate: print a paper document; scan it at 150DPI; add random noise; print what you scanned
@kravietz @kensanata @grimmware @rysiek I have faxed over PSTN as well as over SIP in serial w/PSTN. You seem to be talking about quality not reliability. I use this cmd to obtain a WYSIWYG fax doc: gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=tiffg3 -r204x196 -sPAPERSIZE="$paperform" -dFIXEDMEDIA -sOutputFile="$tiffg3_filename" "$src_pdf"
@resist1984 @kensanata @grimmware @rysiek well, it's not much of use if it reliably transfers unreadable bitmap isn't it?
@kravietz @rysiek @grimmware @kensanata have you tested that command? Your content is generated electronically. Rendering a vector PDF as a 200dpi fax is very readable. That can be fax-transmitted as-is; no need for scanning.
@kensanata @grimmware @rysiek @kravietz your concern for the "analog" line is a red herring, because the signal is digitally modulated with error correction over that analog line, so the receiving fax station gets an exact copy.
@resist1984 @kensanata @grimmware @rysiek
If you're concerned about email privacy today a much more suitable solution would to produce a *text* PDF (as opposed to bitmap) and send over Magic Wormhole or any other P2P communication protocol abundance of which we have out there.
@kravietz @rysiek @grimmware @kensanata anything you do in email is subject to the tens of reliability pitfalls mentioned in this article https://oasis.code-cat.com/posts/1833714. Magic Wormhole does nothing for most of those issues. Indeed there are many superior options to email/fax/pstn, but you only have those options if the other party uses them to begin with.
@kensanata @grimmware @rysiek @kravietz To be clear, the thesis is not "fax is better than everything". The thesis is "fax is more reliable than email".
@kravietz @rysiek @grimmware @kensanata on rare occasions, the recipient I need to contact is using an email service that does not DNSBL residential IPs & where the service is not gmail, hotmail, outlook, yahoo, or other such PRISM junk. In those cases I send an encrypted PDF - assuming I can find a different channel to xmit the password.
@kensanata @grimmware @rysiek @kravietz to send a msgs back and fourth over a long term calls for both sides to install something special or unconventional (e.g. magic wormhole, Wire, etc). But you still have to make initial contact to negotiate that - to ask them to install something. Fax is more reliable than email for that initial contact.
@resist1984 @kensanata @grimmware @rysiek Well, you can chat over raw TCP using netcat - I routinely transfer large backups this way :) wormhole just simplifies that if NAT is involved.
