1684681 - Encrypt email to GPG recipient also when sender has no GPG key pair

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 164408

(MailNews Core :: Security: OpenPGP, defect)

Description

[soriyath]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:82.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/82.0

Steps to reproduce:

OS: macOS Mojave (10.14.6)
Thunderbird version 78.6.0 64 bits (up to date on 02.01.2021 11h06 CET)

I want to send an email from an address A that does not have a GPG key pair to an address B that has a key pair. I do have the public key of address B.

Actual results:

I cannot send the email because address A does not have a GPG key pair.
When trying to send from an address C that has a key pair, it works.

Expected results:

It should be possible to encrypt an email to address C using its public key.
The email would be encrypted but would not be signed (because address A does not have a private key).

The UI should inform the user that the email is encrypted and not signed (preferrably in a passive way using pictograms on the toolbar, possibly with a modal form but that would become annoying super fast).

The UI may show a button to generate a keypair for address A, but not discard the current use case (i.e. send an encrypted email to address B).

In general, the behaviour of Enigmail was right: one should be able to decide if an email should be encrypted and/or signed, using the key that makes most sense (out of the emails used for the communication) or ones that the user can choose at the moment he/she is writing the email; furthermore, it should not be assumed that end user will always use S/MIME if it is available: the end user should be able to switch from S/MIME and GPG easily (one way and the other). The assumption that S/MIME is the nominal/correct/preferred way to encrypt is wrong: users must be able to use whatever solution they want.

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Alias is being worked on in bug 164408.