Please allow the use of GPG / PGP with Mail.app

Originator:mgprot
Number:rdar://7202498 Date Originated:06-Sep-2009
Status:Duplicate/4796966 Resolved:
Product:Mac OS X Product Version:10.6.1
Classification:security Reproducible:always
 
06-Sep-2009 05:19 PM Stephen Riehm:
Summary:

The use of GPG to sign/encrypt email was never sanctioned by Apple, however, it was until 10.6 possible with a plugin called GPGMail.

Since Apple did not make a suitable API available, GPGMail was forced to use undocumented APIs and as is to be expected, with the introduction of 10.6 the API's changed and the plugin was rendered useless.
Entire correspondence histories have thus been rendered practically illegible on a permanent basis, even though they are using an open, well known and trusted encryption protocol.

Please either provide an API suitable for signing, encrypting, decrypting and verifying emails via plugins, or build GPG/PGP encryption support into Mail.app.

Steps to Reproduce:

Receive an email which was encrypted with GPG or PGP.

Expected Results:

It should be possible to open and read the email, if the appropriate software is installed.
It should also be possible to reply to the email with the same encryption method.

Actual Results:

PGP encrypted emails are now just displayed as plain text and are completely unintelligible.
The only way to read them is via copy/paste to command line or similar tools.

Regression:

An open API has never existed in Mail.app to my knowledge.

Notes:

Comments


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