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Saving unencrypted mails back to disk

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poc

31 Aug, 2013 01:09 PM

Hello,

has anyone thought over the searchability of encrypted mails? I have a huge mail archive and it often helped me out by researching a topic with Spotlight or similar. The biggest Drawback for me to actually use encryption by default if I have a peer's key is that I cannot search the messages afterwards.

So I'd love to have the choice to write back the unencrypted mail to disk/IMAP/whatever (not possible with Pop3, at least) to keep the stuff searchable. A quick search on this topic put up nothing. I also cannot find anything within current GPGMail (2.0.3 B512). I'm using OS X.8.4.

Yes, I know that I lose secrecy with this. That's why I thing about this possible feature as a choice to be switched on or off in general, with the ability to make exempts per Mail with another icon or something like that.

Thanks for reading, sharing, agreeing or considering. :-)

-- PoC

1. Support Staff 1 Posted by Steve on 05 Sep, 2013 09:06 PM

   

   Hi Poc,

   this is one of the oldest tickets and it's not quite trivial to solve.

   Here's the link:

   https://gpgtools.lighthouseapp.com/projects/65764/tickets/13-allow-...

   I'm closing this discussion. It will be re-opened as soon as the ticket is closed so you'll receive a notification. Feel free to open a new discussions should you run into further problems or need assistance.

   All the best, steve

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2. Steve closed this discussion on 05 Sep, 2013 09:06 PM.

3. Steve re-opened this discussion on 05 Sep, 2013 09:06 PM

4. Steve closed this discussion on 05 Sep, 2013 09:06 PM.

5. poc re-opened this discussion on 05 Sep, 2013 09:31 PM

6. 2 Posted by poc on 05 Sep, 2013 09:31 PM

   

   Hi,

   Am 05.09.2013 um 23:06 schrieb "Steve" <[email blocked]>:

   I must admit, this is all not very informative. It's not only for spotlight, btw. The same could apply to other searching technologies (grep)…
   Anyway, thanks for your kind reply.

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7. Support Staff 3 Posted by Steve on 05 Sep, 2013 09:36 PM

   

   Agreed. The bug description is not the best. But it's what we currently have. Other ideas are floating around. Once we have a first method of allowing searching mails we can go from there.

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8. 4 Posted by poc on 05 Sep, 2013 10:51 PM

   

   Thanks for your fast reply. I think the first step would be to check if it's possible to instruct Mail.app to write back the content of an open window as new Mail either into a local Mailbox or via IMAP. I don't know if EWS allows backputting an email.

   This would solve the problem in a pragmatic way.

   In any case, I feel the user should be able to decide what he wants to accomplish: Mails stay secret (on disk or in the provider's IMAP spool), so only the owner of the privkey can open and read these mails. Or, the user simply wants to make sure the data is encrypted over the wire, from sender to receiver. Once saved unencrypted to disk/local IMAP server/whatever, they stay so - and thus are searchable without hassle.

   I don't think it's possible to (easily) have a spotlight-plugin for PGP-Mails. Somewhere the user has to provide his passphrase which may be different with different keys he possibly used. Eventually, the mail content will be in the Spotlight-Database in unencrypted form to stay searchable. From here it's not far from having the unencrypted mails themselves on disk, regarding to secrecy.

   Just my $0.02…

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9. Support Staff 5 Posted by Steve on 10 Sep, 2013 10:42 AM

   

   Thanks for the input. This discussion is linked in the ticket for further reference.

   I'm closing this discussion. If you need further assistance or have questions open a new discussion any time.

   Best, steve

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10. Steve closed this discussion on 10 Sep, 2013 10:42 AM.