[gentoo-amd64] Sylpheed-claws GPG & S/MIME support (was: Re: Thread-hijacking)

[Conway S. Smith]

On Fri, 06 Oct 2006 21:27:02 -0400
Richard Freeman <rich@××××××××××××××.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 06 Oct 2006 17:02:00 -0600
> "Conway S. Smith" <beolach@×××××××.net> wrote:
>
> > I just recently switched from using thunderbird to using
> > sylpheed-claws, because I found this and a few other behaviors of
> > thunderbird to not be to my liking.
>
> Hmm - doesn't seem too bad (gotta love IMAP - 10 minutes and I'm up
> and running).
>
> How is the gpg/smime support?  Obviously your message was signed -
> does it prompt for a passphrase or do you need gpg-agent running?
> Maybe I just need to keep tinkering but I don't see any obvious place
> to select a signing key (I did find the SSL cert directory - haven't
> had time to export/import those).
>

GPG support is good, using the "standard" plugins built by default.  It
does prompt for the passphrase, no need for gpg-agent to be running.
You can choose the GPG key used in Configuration->Edit
Accounts->(Select Account)->Edit->Plugins->GPG.  You can also create a
new key there.

I'm not as familiar with S/MIME, but sylpheed-claws seems to support it
via "extra" plugins, either (in portage)
mail-client/sylpheed-claws-smime or
mail-client/sylpheed-claws-etpan-privacy.
mail-client/sylpheed-claws-smime is missing an amd64 keyword, but seems
to compile & work OK for me, although it does have a note "WARNING:
This plugin doesn't handle sign+encrypt and encryption of multipart
messages very well (yet)." and "This plugin uses the GPGME library as a
wrapper for GnuPG. This plugin also needs gpgsm, gnupg-agent and
dirmngr installed and configured."  So that plugin is maybe not yet
mature.  I didn't really try the etpan-privacy plugin, as it conflicts
with the standard gpg plugins (it provides both GPG & S/MIME support),
but maybe it's more mature.  You can load & unload the plugins you want
or don't want in Configuration->Plugins.

> Grr - encryption must not be ready for prime time - it considered your
> message "encrypted" and consequently it wants to encrypt this reply
> (rather rude on mailing lists...)  :)

Odd... when I click reply to my earlier message, it doesn't seem to
consider it encrypted.  Did you double check the Account Privacy
settings to make sure it wasn't set to always encrypt messages?  I
can't think why it would want to encrypt the reply.

Did you try changing those options in thunderbird at all?  They didn't
seem to do anything for me, but they are supposed to work, and I'd be
interested in hearing if they work for someone other than myself.


Conway S. Smith