PGP with Snow Leopard ?

It is easier to just use Leopard, for now.

wereHamster wrote:

John Lockwood wrote:
... since GPG is effectively 'discontinued' ...

{{citation needed}}

I'm also looking into getting GPG working with Mail.app and I'm a bit surprised by that statement. Can you elaborate?

Perhaps I could have been more precise. Of course GPG itself is not being discontinued, but effectively it has been for the Mac. As requested (from this very thread) here is a citation

"The developer of GPGMail, Stéphane Corthésy, has reported ( http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=999042) that he does not have time to update the software for compatibility with Snow Leopard's Mail.app."

With regards to -

david.kreindler wrote:
The problem is simply one of getting PGP support in Snow Leopard's Mail.app and future revisions of Mail.app.

As I indicated Mac PGP (including Mail support) is going to be be upgraded to be compatible with Snow Leopard. However unlike S/MIME or the now defunct GPG for Mac this is not free.

See http://blog.pgp.com/index.php/2009/08/sneak-peek-pgp-whole-disk-encryption-for-s now-leopard/

It is interesting that Apple do seem to use PGP signatures themselves.

See https://www.apple.com/support/security/pgp/

I would guess they are using the commercial Mac PGP software.

Apple used GnuPG v2.0.9 (Darwin) in their most recent security alert.

There are ways to use GnuPG without GPGMail but none as convenient, especially when dealing with MIME encodings other than text/plain.

Well I understand the feeling of loss over a piece of software that used and undocumented feature (bad practice by ANY programmer) PGP and GPG are not in wide spread general use outside of a bunch of tech geeks. The S/MIME v3 standard is, however, increasing being used by corporations. PGP may be more widely used than S/MIME among the "techno-elite" but the mass market penetration is so insignificant that it’s a moot point.

PGP requires that you must have PGP software installed on both sending and receiving ends and both ends must generate their own PGP keys and has little support across email clients. Definitely not a "It just work" scenario.

For S/MIME the user needs nothing more than install a signed digital certificate which can be obtained free ( http://www.thawte.com/secure-email/personal-email-certificates/) and which work on ANY modern email client.

In other word, why would Apple spend development dollars on a feature that only a bunch of geeks use?

Khurt Williams wrote:

In other word, why would Apple spend development dollars on a feature that only a bunch of geeks use?

Because Apple just invalidated the most convenient way to validate their own security advisories? I assume that only "a bunch of geeks" cares to validate those security advisories rather than to trust email blindly....

I agree.

easy access to gpg in mail for the masses

Then everybody reading this thread and agreeing as such needs to post feedback at http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html. Because if Apple doesn't get hammered by a couple thousand complaining customers (and who knows, it might take maybe a couple tens of thousands), I am 100.0% certain that they will do nothing.

I don't know about you all ... but I gave up on trying to get PGP / GPGmail to work with every successive iteration of OSX. (After all, it's not like Apple sprung Snow Leopard on the community. PGP could have had a release ready to go if they were motivated. Slackers.)

I finally opted to use the Firefox plugin FireGPG, http://getfiregpg.org, to encrypt/sign/decrypt messages. Yeah, you have to cut and paste into their txt editor which is not as handy as having a button on mail.app's toolbar, but you do what you have to.

Give it a try.

SurfBoy wrote:
I finally opted to use the Firefox plugin FireGPG, http://getfiregpg.org, to encrypt/sign/decrypt messages. Yeah, you have to cut and paste into their txt editor which is not as handy as having a button on mail.app's toolbar, but you do what you have to.

Give it a try.

Thanks for the info on FireGPG. I'll take a look. This might suffice for people with low volumes of encrypted mail who don't want to go back to Thunderbird/Enigmail.

4 September 2009: Good news and bad news! First the good news: Jonas Schnelli volunteered to dig into the sources of GPGMail trying to make it compatible with Mail 4.0 from Snow Leopard. He definitely would be glad if someone could join him to discuss problems. So if you feel you could contribute please do not hesitate to get in touch with me or join the project GPGMail directly.
The bad news is, that code and libraries seem to be too old to be ported to a 64Bit System. Thus Jonas will aim for a 32Bit version for the time being. The consequence is that you will not be able to use the 64Bit version of Apple's Mail if you want to add encryption funktionalities to it. But I believe we could get over it, couldn't we?

- http://macgpg.sourceforge.net/

Killing GPGmail is a deal breaker for me as well. All my company mail is signed and S/MIME is no replacement for GPG.

As sad as it sounds: I probably have to downgrade to Leopard again until someone fixed GPGmail to work with 10.6.

... if Apple would just provide a documentation to the full API and not be so childish stubborn to treat it like a big secret.

Everyone seems fixated on GPGMail, as I pointed out PGP.com have confirmed they will be updating their product for Snow Leopard Compatibility.