Protonmail now supports searching in the content of all your mail, though.
Or at least the web client. It will ask you to download all your mail, and it will make an encrypted search index on your computer.
That’s cool but I like to have a central client for all my email providers. I’ve decided to go to fastmail which is good enough for my threat model. The thing that really convinced me is their blog post.
The main thing I care about is the security of the text in transit, and the philosophy of the service I’m using. All respectable mail providers use TLS (even gmail and outlook) but I don’t like their advertiser dependent business model. Proton, tutanota, and I think startmail do respect privacy, but I believe it’s dumb to depend on an external server if you’re that paranoid about your communications that you need to have your email using PGP. Just encrypt your own stuff and tell the other party to do the same. Or self host everything.
That’s a paid service, right? I don’t know much about them, they may have other pros too, but proton also allows you to use your own email client if you’re in a plan.
Honestly, I can’t think of a good reason. This is just how email has always worked. What Thunderbird stores locally is identical to message on the server. It’s not decrypted because no conversion happens when syncing mail.
I agree, it would make sense to keep plaintext emails locally or on a trusted server for practical reasons.
If you’re in Linux, you can use eCryptfs to setup a private encrypted directory, move the ~/.thunderbird directory into it and just leave a symlink to it in your unencrypted home directory. Then you can store your emails in plain text in the encrypted private directory.
It’s not even complicated to set up: most Linux distributions are setup so that the private directory is automounted upon login: when you’re not logged in, your data at rest is encrypted. It only becomes readable when you’re logged in.
Both my Thunderbird and Firefox directories are stored in my private directory.
This does not answer the question. OP wants to Thunderbird to decrypt PGP mails. Yes, it makes sense to use an encrypting fs, but we are still missing this thunderbird feature.
I ran into an issue with hardware 2FA enabled and a new phone.
One of my Ubikeys is always plugged into my desktop, the other is on my keychain for wireless authentication with my phone.
Apparently, only the most recently used hardware 2FA is allowed to authenticate wirelessly to add a new device. Since my other Ubikey wasn’t wireless the only recourse was to remove the hardware 2FA, add the phone and then re-add the hardware 2FA.
I’ve been trying to move away from email as a document server.
Anything that’s important / I might want to reference later gets exported to a secure paperless-ngx instance where it’s neatly categorized and easily searched. I then delete it from my inbox.
Notice that the opposition to these scans happened only after a Senator was included in the warrantless dragnet.
The reforms introduced Tuesday reflect discomfort over the practice of warrantless scans, which are authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Its opponents were galvanized when the Office of Director of National Intelligence revealed in July that the FBI had improperly conducted searches for information about a U.S. senator and two state officials.
reminds me of the John Oliver episode on Data Brokers where he started buying up data on senators in an effort to get better regulations about tracking data and aggregation bc that seems to be the only way they want to pass bills. Their interests > interests of the people they should be representing
Do you have to put in your password on every session in protonmail? If not, then that means that either the key is unencrypted and is stored somewhere else as plaintext or the password is stored somewhere also as plaintext, which would defeat the purpose.
Just as it inconveniences you to have to decrypt to search, it would similarly slow down anyone malicious who gains access to your machine.
Am in favour of allowing users to decide which features are best for their needs, but this seems like it would be easy to forget to reinstitute local encryption after a search, so can also understand why developers prevent storing in plaintext.
You can’t search encrypted emails, period. The way I see the benefit of encrypting emails is to not have them compromised in the cloud servers. But on my own machine, if someone gains access to the files, then it’s all ogre. Maybe that’s just me IDK.
Point is, one can decrypt each email individually. That slows an malicious attacker rummaging in your device from finding what they are after as much as it does you.
You wouldn’t be alone in wanting this feature, but for those who need rather than prefer to encrypt, the option to store locally in plaintext is a major risk. On balance it seems better for developers to pay heed to that than to our preferences.
For the rest of us, we can download the emails we wish to refer to with ease, or we can create aides memoire to make it easy to locate specific emails later.
Well, this is just like the CIA or whatever attending Defcon. Google undoubtedly has some ulterior motive, whether it's to poach the best and brightest or to dilute the messaging, etc.
Google are totally into blocking ads. That was the whole catch line for selling WEI. “We’ll block all the random ads for you and keep you safe”. What they didn’t say was that they would replace the blocked ads with Google bought ads.
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