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What more or less sunk PGP for me was gmail. The various gpg-in-chrome plugins I've tried have been pretty uniformly terrible (including Google's own end-to-end

by moyix 11y ago

What more or less sunk PGP for me was gmail. The various gpg-in-chrome plugins I've tried have been pretty uniformly terrible (including Google's own end-to-end), so the standard web interface is out. And unfortunately, by allowing me to store so much mail (~7.5GB at the moment), gmail has made it effectively impossible to use any other IMAP client – I've left Mail.app and Thunderbird running for days trying to do their initial sync, to no avail. The only client that actually works with the amount of mail I have, and has PGP support, is mutt, and even that takes ~5 minutes to read in its header index on startup. The end result is I pretty much just don't use PGP unless someone sends me something encrypted (which does happen! But probably this is just because I work in security), and then I break out mutt and resign myself to waiting around a bit for things to load.

mpnordland 11y ago
My setup uses alot/notmuch with offlineimap doing sync. If you have offlineimap sync on cron, or put it in daemon mode, you don't have to wait at all.
alooPotato 11y ago
can you expand on what you found terrible about the chrome plugins that added decryption to gmail?
- moyix 11y ago
  Disclaimer: this was about a year ago, so some things may have changed. Specific comments mainly apply to Google's own end-to-end, since that's the one I remember best. In general, they tended to not mesh well with the gmail UI – you could decrypt, but the decrypted message would pop up in a new window. And sometimes it just wouldn't detect that a message was encrypted, so you'd have to select the encrypted text, find the context menu for it, etc. Composing was also more difficult than it needed to be – another extra set of steps to remember before hitting send, rather than something that would be triggered automatically if the recipient was in my keyring. Basically, the functionality offered usually ended up not being much better than selecting the message, opening a terminal, and doing `pbpaste | gpg --decrypt` (or --encrypt on the way out).
unsignedint 11y ago
There is an option to fetch only last some number of E-mail through IMAP, but then you can't back log so it defeats the purpose of fetching E-mail this way. (and for the same reason, I moved from Thunderbird to Gnus.) From my experience, it seems to be just about any MUA on any platforms will start choking when it starts getting around 2GB to 3GB -- not only fetching takes forever, but also makes it very unresponsive. We have a few people here using Outlook with Google for Work, and I had to set it up to limit fetching and tell them to go on to mail from a browser for older E-mails as it'll start doing weird stuff when it hits a certain threshold.
rakoo 11y ago
Use offlineimap. It's slow, but I built this [1] to watch my Gmail mailbox and launch a sync whenever a new mail arrives so I don't have to wait and I don't have to poll. After that you can use mutt with the maildir you have locally. Bonus: you get to backup your mails. I use sup (https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup/ https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup/) as a MUA to manage my mail, with the gpgpme gem [2] I can use gpg almost flawlessy (but I'm biased, I help maintain it :) [1] https://github.com/rakoo/idlewatch https://github.com/rakoo/idlewatch [2] https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup/wiki/gpg https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup/wiki/gpg

by moyix 11y ago

mpnordland 11y ago

My setup uses alot/notmuch with offlineimap doing sync. If you have offlineimap sync on cron, or put it in daemon mode, you don't have to wait at all.

alooPotato 11y ago

can you expand on what you found terrible about the chrome plugins that added decryption to gmail?

moyix 11y ago
Disclaimer: this was about a year ago, so some things may have changed. Specific comments mainly apply to Google's own end-to-end, since that's the one I remember best. In general, they tended to not mesh well with the gmail UI – you could decrypt, but the decrypted message would pop up in a new window. And sometimes it just wouldn't detect that a message was encrypted, so you'd have to select the encrypted text, find the context menu for it, etc. Composing was also more difficult than it needed to be – another extra set of steps to remember before hitting send, rather than something that would be triggered automatically if the recipient was in my keyring. Basically, the functionality offered usually ended up not being much better than selecting the message, opening a terminal, and doing `pbpaste | gpg --decrypt` (or --encrypt on the way out).

unsignedint 11y ago

There is an option to fetch only last some number of E-mail through IMAP, but then you can't back log so it defeats the purpose of fetching E-mail this way. (and for the same reason, I moved from Thunderbird to Gnus.) From my experience, it seems to be just about any MUA on any platforms will start choking when it starts getting around 2GB to 3GB -- not only fetching takes forever, but also makes it very unresponsive. We have a few people here using Outlook with Google for Work, and I had to set it up to limit fetching and tell them to go on to mail from a browser for older E-mails as it'll start doing weird stuff when it hits a certain threshold.

rakoo 11y ago

Use offlineimap. It's slow, but I built this [1] to watch my Gmail mailbox and launch a sync whenever a new mail arrives so I don't have to wait and I don't have to poll. After that you can use mutt with the maildir you have locally. Bonus: you get to backup your mails. I use sup (https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup/ https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup/) as a MUA to manage my mail, with the gpgpme gem [2] I can use gpg almost flawlessy (but I'm biased, I help maintain it :) [1] https://github.com/rakoo/idlewatch https://github.com/rakoo/idlewatch [2] https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup/wiki/gpg https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup/wiki/gpg