Hello Roundcube devs and early adopters
Full support for encryption in Roundcube remains one of the most frequently requested features but is still not properly solved. The reason mainly is that doing web crypto right isn't as simple as it seems and there are different, yet controversial, approaches to it. The most promising one in my opinion is to use a locally installed browser extension to do the hard work in a trusted and verifiable way. Mailvelope [1] for Chrome and Firefox is probably the most popular and prevailed crypto extension for this. And now we're getting one step closer to a fully integrated solution. After Thomas Oberndörfer and I once had a chat about how to improve the integration of Mailvelope with web applications like Roundcube and I compiled my wish list for crypto extensions [2], Mailvelope as finally released a first version providing an API [3] for web apps to interact with the crypto module.
I'm proud to announce that Roundcube is amongst the early adopters and we're already working on the integration part to support encryption right from the core using Mailvelope - and possibly other extensions that will follow. There's a working prototype in a development branch of our github repository and is now also available for download and testing [4]. The integration is not yet perfect of course but it allows to read and write full pgp/mime messages including attachments through embedded viewers and editors provided by the Mailvelope API. See some first screen shots to get an idea at Flickr [5].
What's still missing is restoring encrypted messages from drafts for later editing and sending. Here, attachments are not loaded into the editor and get lost. Also key handling and importing needs some love but we're getting there. We're in close contact with the Mailvelope developers and will have these minor issues sorted out soon.
So everybody is welcome to test this little sneak peek version and give us feedback.
Best, Thomas
[1] https://www.mailvelope.com [2] https://roundcubeinbox.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/our-wish-list-for-encryption... [3] http://mailvelope.github.io/mailvelope/index.html [4] http://sourceforge.net/projects/roundcubemail/files/roundcubemail-beta/1.2-m... [5] https://www.flickr.com/photos/roundcube/sets/72157654227279665