Future OpenPGP Support in Thunderbird

[Patrick Brunschwig]

Binarus wrote on 16.10.2019 10:47:
> 
> On 14.10.2019 16:15, Jeff Allen via Gnupg-users wrote:
>>> I don't know either, but perhaps it is in the debug logs the Enigmail
>>> team analyzes?
>>
>> I have used Enigmail since its inception and have never knowingly
>> submitted a log or answered a survey and have always assumed Enigmail
>> does not phone home.
> 
> I am sure that it doesn't phone home. However, to give an example, I had

You can be certain that I'd never implement that.
[...]
> I suppose that the Enigmail team gets quite a lot of such debug logs.
> But I still can't tell (and currently don't have the time to
> investigate) if those logs can tell which keys had been generated by
> Enigmail and which had been generated externally, so the whole thing was
> a guess anyway.

Yes, I did and do get quite a lot of debugging log files, and even more
support requests. And I really speak from experience when I say that the
vast majority of the users of Enigmail don't store their private keys on
external devices.

[...]

> So why not take Enigmail, integrate it into TB, and bundle Gpg4Win setup
> with TB setup? All software they ever could develop themselves will be
> inferior compared to that package, at least in the first time.

I have almost 17 years of experience with supporting Enigmail. About 90%
of all support requests that I get turn out to be setup issues with
GnuPG. Interestingly, most of them are on Linux, even though all Linux
distributions I know ship GnuPG. The bundling/shipping would not be a
worry for me. The main problem is the additional complexity that it
brings if you require an external component that you cannot *fully*
control. This covers topics like different behavior of different
versions, but also configuration issues, users rights to install
something on their PC and more. Gpgme may handle some of these issues,
but the fact remains: an external component makes things a lot more
complex, especially for support.

-Patrick