[Enigmail] question regarding encryption and mailing lists

[John Clizbe]

Brandon Blackmoor wrote:
> My name is Brandon Blackmoor. I have been playing with encryption for
> nearly two decades, primarily using PGP and its offshoots. I gave up on
> it many times, because it was just too much trouble to use, and it
> requires both the sender and the recipient to use it.
> 
> After many years, I stumbled across Enigmail earlier today, and I have
> to say I am utterly amazed. This makes email encryption absolutely
> painless! This is incredible! I plan to start anew, trying to coax my
> friends and family into adopting it.

Good luck.

> However, I have a few practical questions. If there are links which
> provide the answers, feel to reply with the link rather than repeating
> what has been said before. I am more than willing to read. Also, feel
> free to assume that I have a basic knowledge of how public-key
> cryptography works, but if you choose to explain a simple concept, I
> will not be offended.

We do our best to make it understanale without dumbing-down or talking-over-heads.

> 1) How do people handle mailing lists, such as this one? Is it feasible
> to encrypt messages sent to a mailing list?

Sending encrypted messages to a public list is to be avoided. In fact, many view
it as an antisocial behavior since few, if any, of the list recipients will be
able to decrypt the message.

Sending encrypted traffic to a private list where the membership is closely
monitored and managed is doable. There are one or two such list at Yahoo! which
operate with everything-encrypted to each member (PGP-Basics is *not* one of
these), but they have small memberships and even though based on a public
system, I think of each as a private list.

It's a bit too cloak-n-dagger for me.

> 2) How do people handle web-based email? Is it feasible to use email
> encryption when one typically checks one's mail via a web site?

Signing with web mail is rather hit-and-miss. Encryption with web mail actually
works as the things that break signing are not available to be applied to an
encrypted message. All one needs is either current window or clipboard
functionality such as that provided my PGP or the GPGshell application on
Windows or the FireGPG extension to Firefox.

A good number of folks opt for composing an encypted message first in a local
editor, encrypting, and *then* pasting the encrypted message into the web mail
form instead of composing in the form window.

> Thank you for your time, and for this wonderful piece of software.

You are most welcome.

-- 
John P. Clizbe                      Inet:John (a) Mozilla-Enigmail.org
You can't spell fiasco without SCO. hkp://keyserver.gingerbear.net  or
     mailto:pgp-public-keys at gingerbear.net?subject=HELP

Q:"Just how do the residents of Haiku, Hawai'i hold conversations?"
A:"An odd melody / island voices on the winds / surplus of vowels"

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