this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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GPG isn't beginner friendly if you're only using the CLI. However, even then there are tons of documentations and even Gemini/ChatGPT would prob be good at helping users create/manage their keys. However, I can provide a list of user-friendly GUI apps to create/manage/encrypt/etc. using GPG if you'd like that make it as easy. I mean, you can pay a company that says they'll protect your privacy but history has shown paying for privacy is unreliable.
@timewarp @Quill7513 The only real alternative IMHO is hosting your own mail server and *that* is no alternative at all, because big-tech will blacklist your server immediately… so Proton/Tuta are the lesser of all evils. If you have a true alternative I am listening.
You can use PGP with just about any email service. I personally just use SimpleLogin, where you can add your public key to have all your messages encrypted. But Thunderbird, KMail, Evolution, FairMail, etc all support email encryption too with IMAP.
@timewarp ok, PGP … remember EFAIL… and all kinds of usability issues which inevitably lead to security issues by ‘wrong use’ at some point. And another *centralized* ‘web of trust’ (benign as it may be) is also not something I look forward to. O well, some genius will emerge at some point and deliver us 🥳 may he/she/it/them be FOSS-minded
It's quite possible that privacy is too hard for you and trash talking open source makes you feel better about the money you're paying to someone else to say they'll do a better job for you.
@timewarp don’t know what you’re talking about, I love FOSS…
Okay, well it's just the vulnerabilities you mentioned were geared towards email client issues that among other things would automatically load HTML data upon decryption. Furthermore, primary vulnerable targets were 10 year old email clients at the time that hadn't received any security updates. The SE data packet issue had been documented even in the spec since at least 2007 about its security issues and recommended rapid mitigation techniques. All in all, the EFAIL documented issues with mail client failures, not with OpenPGP itself.
Second, OpenPGP web-of-trust, or whatever you want to call it (public keyservers) is entirely optional. In fact, Proton relies heavily on this in from what I can tell actually enforces it in a more insecure way, but opting users into their internal keyserver automatically.