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Sure, if you only ever check your email from that one workstation, it's easy. That's not really how email works today. Most people expect their email to work se

Sure, if you only ever check your email from that one workstation, it's easy. That's not really how email works today. Most people expect their email to work seamlessly across multiple devices and OS's. Email would be useless to me if I couldn't use it on my phone.

NoGravitas 11y ago
My home workstation and my phone both talk to the same IMAP server (my home server). The phone has K-9 Mail and OpenKeychain on it; no trouble sending and receiving PGP mail at both locations. Not that I have anyone to send PGP mail to, since no one uses it...
- grahamburger 11y ago
  Yeah, I've been there too. At the company I worked for a few years ago I tried to get everyone using PGP. One or two actually did. The problem is that while it's usually possible to set it up on a mobile device, it's not trivial, and you lose some important features. For example I very often need to search for an old email on my phone. If that email came in encrypted, then I'm not going to be able to find it if it's not stored on the phone. (Right? Was I just doing something wrong?)
- nickik 11y ago
  The problem is the security of you GPG jey. If my phone gets hacked or stolen I lose my key. Sure, my master key is not on my phone (or my workstation) but still a big deal. I use Yubikey Smartcard both on my workstation and on my phone. The setup works, but its both exepnsive, takes a long time to set up and its fairly difficult to do. Now that I have the setup, I can only use it with a few friends. Keybase is working on a more scalable solution. Every device has different keys and messages are encrypted for each device. This allows them to revoke individual devices. While deploying this to most non technical people, is still quite a challenge, at least its an attempt at solving the multi device problem. I can at least imagen how with their approch we could get wide use, while with traditional gpg I cant really see it.

NoGravitas 11y ago

My home workstation and my phone both talk to the same IMAP server (my home server). The phone has K-9 Mail and OpenKeychain on it; no trouble sending and receiving PGP mail at both locations. Not that I have anyone to send PGP mail to, since no one uses it...

grahamburger 11y ago
Yeah, I've been there too. At the company I worked for a few years ago I tried to get everyone using PGP. One or two actually did. The problem is that while it's usually possible to set it up on a mobile device, it's not trivial, and you lose some important features. For example I very often need to search for an old email on my phone. If that email came in encrypted, then I'm not going to be able to find it if it's not stored on the phone. (Right? Was I just doing something wrong?)
nickik 11y ago
The problem is the security of you GPG jey. If my phone gets hacked or stolen I lose my key. Sure, my master key is not on my phone (or my workstation) but still a big deal. I use Yubikey Smartcard both on my workstation and on my phone. The setup works, but its both exepnsive, takes a long time to set up and its fairly difficult to do. Now that I have the setup, I can only use it with a few friends. Keybase is working on a more scalable solution. Every device has different keys and messages are encrypted for each device. This allows them to revoke individual devices. While deploying this to most non technical people, is still quite a challenge, at least its an attempt at solving the multi device problem. I can at least imagen how with their approch we could get wide use, while with traditional gpg I cant really see it.