I’ve been using eM Client for quite a while now, encrypting/decrypting E-Mails via copy/paste.
I really like eM Client, but for me the lack of PGP-Support and the lack of a Plugin-SDK to implement it myself is annoying.
But for normal people like my mother it is preventing them from using PGP.
Since now is the time and people are mobilized, is there a timeframe when you will support PGP or facilitate integration with GPG4Win or should i leave the ship?
Hello,
PGP support is not planned in the moment, same as SDK kit. We are now focusing on features required by more users.
regards
Jan
I completely agree. I’m having to consider Postbox, Thunderbird (ugh!), etc. because it is simply too cumbersome to use eM Client with PGP / GPG. I recognize that you have to prioritize limited development resources, but I would like to strongly urge you to consider something like an Enigmail plugin for eM Client.
Hello,
I have changed this topic from issue to idea for people to +1 this, but still we do not plan to implement this function.
Of course if enough people will request this we can consider implement this.
regards
Jan
I think that PGP it’s crucial component to promote emclient as the perfect mail client.
I hope that soon it’s future implementation
Alex
I have some serious issues with Thunderbird, emClient’s IMAP support is far superior. I really like the way XMPP, CardDAV and CalDAV are integrated without any hassle, it just works out of the box.
For now, I will stick to the free version of emClient because I still have to use Thunderbird for PGP/GPG encrypted mail. I hope you will reconsider and implement support, this is a killer feature not only for me but for apparently quite a few people.
I believe eM Client has already support for signing and encrypting e-mail.
Is that not good enough compared to PGP?
Somebody’s “good enough” is somebody else’s “not quite enough”. Personally, I use both, but there is a pretty distinct difference between them.
I use S/MIME exclusively for business mail. I only have a few customers who use PGP, almost everybody uses S/MIME for signing and encrypting.
For private mail, I have virtually zero people who use S/MIME but I write and receive PGP - encrypted mail on an almost daily basis.
Especially because of the NSA/GCHQ revelations of the last months I have quite a few friends and relatives coming to me lately and ask me about how they can encrypt their mail. Right now, I show them how to setup Thunderbird with Enigmail. EmClient would be my first choice, but using a separate program to encrypt/decrypt and using copy and paste for mail creation and reading is just too much of a hassle.
I don’t want to start a discussion about certificates issued and signed by a CA vs. the whole Web of Trust thing, but no, for apparently more than only a few people, S/MIME alone is not good enough.
This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
pgp / openpgp support - any plans?.
How about openpgp / pgp support - imho a must for a serious enterprise level email client.
This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
hi every day i hear from nsa prism and co…pgp???.
hi every day i hear from nsa prism and co…it would be cool if emclient supports openpgp/gnupgp to encrypt emails very easy…maybe with enigmail plugin??
This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
PGP.
Is there a way to use PGP with eM Client? It says the certificate keys are in the wrong format.
I have merged all topic regarding PGP support into one for better orientation about this topic.
Jan
Very good idea, I was actually looking through the forum to see other discussions.
One question: the comment you gave here: https://discourse.emclient.com/emclient/to… is this representative of the way public key crypto is understood at your company? I must admin I was a bit shocked to read something like this from an official representative.
That one is even better than his post earlier today that PGP could be cracked on his home-PC (https://discourse.emclient.com/emclient/to… ).
Combining all posts he states that
Wow, I really have issues trusting a company with that combination of thoughts (and lies) on security…
We have decided to use and follow different standards, maybe in the future we will consider PGP but at this moment it is not considered.
Jan
Hi R.W.,
I’ve just read a little bit about S/MIME … I think that’s also an signing/encryption mechanism depending on a public/private key pair, just like PGP.
Why is S/MIME not good enough? Is it difficult to get the certificate from a CA? Is the algorithm used not good enough? Is the length of the keys not long enough?
If you look at https://discourse.emclient.com/emclient/to…, you can see that their current S/MIME implementation is limited to weaker algorithms. There is also a very different trust infrastructure involved which may or may not satisfy everyone’s needs.
I did not mean to imply that one is better than the other. They are both public key encryption schemes. The main difference is their respective trust model.
S/MIME works a little like SSL/TLS in that you have certificate authorities (CA) that issue signed certificates and if you trust the CA and their way of ensuring identities, you could reasonably trust the certificates they signed. To get the most out of this, you need some kind of public key infrastructure (PKI) to issue, manage and revoke certificates.
PGP is based on a principle called web of trust, where everybody can issue themselves a key pair and trust can be achieved by people signing their keys. So if you trust me and my key and somebody has a key signed by me, you might also trust that the person with that particular key is who he claims he is.
To make matters more complicated, you can use S/MIME in a web-of-trust kind of way and you can also manage PGP keys in a PKI. Yay!
It all comes down to acceptance and usage. Personally, I don’t know a single private person that uses S/MIME, all my private contacts who use encryption are using PGP/GnuPG. That does not mean that S/MIME is worse, it’s just not used in my private communication. If it works for you and you and your friends/contacts are comfortable using it, good for you 
I generally question the CA model that is predominantly used today and prefer PGP’s approach, but for now, no better system has been widely established, so we need make good use of what we have 
Hi R.W. and Randy,
Thanks for your explanations!
I’m not using encryption (yet) for my e-mails, and I also never receive encrypted e-mail, but I’ve always been interested in encrypting, that’s why I’ve asked for extra info.
I know .NET has native support for encryption, and eM Client is built using .NET, so maybe it’s easy enough to add support for PGP. (Although I don’t know whether .NET has native support for PGP specifically.)
+1
While emClient supports S/MIME, it’s really cumbersome for private use, as free class-1 certificates are issued with only a 1-year validity (Comodo). After each year, one has to contact all friends and instruct them to import the new certificate into their cert-store. That will never work well for people.
Support for PGP similiar in functionality to enigmail (https://www.enigmail.net) would allow secure email without all the trouble of short-lived S/MIME certs and, if implemented in an accessible way, be an excellent selling point for emClient!