GMail Encryption

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:09:01 GMT  <== Computers ==> 

With the death of FireGPG a couple of years ago, easy mechanisms for dealing with encrypted email in GMail became few and far between. I usually copy and paste to/from Emacs, and use EasyPG Assistant (EPA) to do the crypto from there. But I just discovered that FireGPG is being supported again, at https://github.com/bit/firegpg . I tried it. I had to edit the script that built the XPI file to work on my Mac. Firefox complained about a corrupt XPI file, so I followed the directions for installing it in developer mode. That worked. It has a nice, professional interface, and I was able to successfully encrypt a message. I had some trouble decrypting. You have to select the text you want to decrypt. It didn't automatically identify it, though I had that option enabled, and I think it's supposed to. It worked to select the encrypted text, open the FireGPG text editor, paste, then click "Decrypt". Not much easier than EPA for me, but good for non-Emacs users.

For Chrome, there's GPG4Browsers, an all-javascript PGP implementation. It successfully encrypted a message, but got an error decrypting it. Also, its user interface is very primitive. Hopefully, they'll keep working on it and bring it up to product quality.

FireGPG

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Comments (2):

Gmail supports SMTP and

Submitted by Ken Hagler on Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:24:33 GMT

Gmail supports SMTP and IMAP, so if you're not too attached to using a web interface, you could use either Apple Mail with GPGMail or Thunderbird with Enigma, they both work fine (although GPGMail tends to break after system updates).

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That will work for some

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:27:55 GMT

That will work for some people. The reason I use Gmail is because I find its user interface to be the best I've seen in any client, desktop, webapp, or handheld. But EPA works pretty well for me.

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