1419233 - Allow saving of unsafe draft of an encrypted mail if no key of the recipient is available (S/MIME)

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Security: S/MIME, enhancement)

Description

[Frank]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
Build ID: 20171113102334

Steps to reproduce:

I have the setting “always activate encryption” enabled. I then wrote a new mail.


Actual results:

After some time, TB tries to save the draft. Then I got an error, due to TB not being able to save a draft.


Expected results:

For saving an own draft on my own machine, I can’t imagine that a key of the recipient is necessary? Could this be fixed?

Default encryption should also be deactivated (and the symbol be crossed out via a red strike), if there is no key of the recipient.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

certainly a challenging area https://mzl.la/2jaJEnV

what precisely are you using for encryption?

Comment 2

[Frank]

Oh. S/MIME, actually, through MS Exchange.

Comment 3

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Seems like a usability issue. Enigmail doesn't allow saving a draft if it can't encrypt it, but there is an option to save an "unsafe" draft. I'm not so familiar with S/MIME.

Comment 4

[Frank]

But shouldn’t it be able to encrypt it with my own encryption key?

Comment 5

[Frank]

A fairly better solution would be to show up an appropriate icon – like a red crossed out save icon. This isn’t as annoying as an error message. I hate this **** Windows UX with annoying error prompts appearing all the time.

Comment 6

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

(In reply to Frank from comment #4)
> But shouldn’t it be able to encrypt it with my own encryption key?
Encryption is a difficult field. S/MIME is a public key encryption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography) and the e-mail in encrypted with the public key of the recipient, and they decrypt it with their private key.

I'm not an expert in this field, but what you're asking for is an enhancement as I think the system works as designed and says:
Unable to save your message as a draft.
You specified encryption for this message, but the application failed to find an encryption certificate for ... .

Comment 7

[Frank]

Yes, that’s what is done when I actually send an encrypted mail. But if I’d encrypt my draft with the public key of the recipient, I won’t be able to edit my draft again! So I have to encrypt it with my own key.

Also here it would be better to display a red crossed out lock icon – so that it’s pretty obvious, that this mail won’t be encrypted – but then we wuold have a much less annoying UX. :)

Comment 8

[Frank]

You specified “unsafe draft” in your summary, but I hope someone can tell us, if we could encrypt it via an own key – then it would be safe. :)

And I’d like to add: “…and make the errors less annoying”

Thanks!

Comment 9

[Kai Engert (:KaiE:)]

In bug 1681168 we allowed disabling the saving of encrypted drafts for OpenPGP.

The name of the default pref is mail.identity.default.autoEncryptDrafts - and it can have an identifiy (account) specific override.

It would make sense to honor the same pref when saving S/MIME drafts.

I also agree with the other comment made above, when saving an encrypted S/MIME draft, we shouldn't try to use the recipient's keys yet, we should use the user's own key for encrypting.