939425 - Better integration of Enigmail

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[z0idberg]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20131112160018

Steps to reproduce:

Enigmail is a great addon, but unfortunately it is apparent that it is just an addon and not a core feature of Thunderbird. Being an addon is not a problem in itself, but the limitations of Thunderbirds addon interface make Enigmail not as usable and convenient as S/MIME.

Some examples which are, as far as I can see, based on Thunderbird’s addon limitations:

- PGP/MIME mails will be displayed as mails with attachments even if there is no attachment (this is not the case with S/MIME, where the S/MIME attachments are completely hidden)
- It is AFAIK not possible to permanently decrypt a mail and let Thunderbird store the decrypted mail.
- It would be nice to select on a per-recipient case in the address book if the recipient uses S/MIME or PGP or none (in essence, move the enigmail recipient rules to the address book).
- PGP mails are obviously passed to Enigmail and decrypted after being opened, so that there is a slight delay where you can often see the encrypted mail (Especially obvious with Inline PGP mails). This is not really pretty.
- Put PGP and S/MIME account configurations in one place and e.g. be able to select if new mails use S/MIME or PGP by default. 

Additionally it would be good if Thunderbird at least detected a PGP signed message, even if Enigmail is not installed and displays that this is "PGP signed" and the user should install Enigmail to use it. Or at least hide the PGP signature, so that users without Enigmail will not get confused by the weird attachment or text in the mail body.

In order to improve Enigmail implementation and make its usage even to S/MIME it would therefore be nice if the Thunderbird and the Enigmail team would discuss the necessary changes in the Thunderbird plugin infrastructure and hopefully improve both applications. Both Thunderbird and Enigmail are great programs, but the GPG support could really be improved so that GPG can be used in a more reliable/respectable way.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

how to move forward?

Comment 2

[Patrick Brunschwig]

For most of the things requested here concern Enigmail, and do not need changes to Thunderbird. The only exceptions are:

- PGP/MIME mails will be displayed as mails with attachmxents even if there is no attachment 
--> needs to be addressed in Thunderbird, see bug 415083.

- It is AFAIK not possible to permanently decrypt a mail and let Thunderbird store the decrypted mail.
--> correct, that's true for S/MIME too. That's part of the work required for bug 188988.

Everything else concerns only Enigmail, and I'd suggest to report these requests to the Enigmail bug tracking system (https://www.enigmail.net/support/bugs.php).