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
Hi Thomas, I had a quick look and it looks nice. Wish mailvelope supported key servers directly but thats a minor thing
Is this expected to be in 1.2? And any eta voor 1.2?
I'll give it a look
On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 9:27 AM, Cor Bosman cor@xs4all.nl wrote:
Hi Thomas, I had a quick look and it looks nice. Wish mailvelope supported key servers directly but thats a minor thing
That's an open question I already asked to the Mailvelope developers. If Mailvelope won't support that directly, we might implement the query and import for public keys from a keyserver in Roundcube.
Is this expected to be in 1.2? And any eta voor 1.2?
If we stick to the roadmap for 1.2, the responsive skin should be in there and that's not anywhere near completion yet. So no ETA for that I'm afraid. But we could consider porting the Mailvelope support to 1.1 and release it there.
~Thomas
On 06/10/2015 12:11 PM, Thomas Bruederli wrote:
Is this expected to be in 1.2? And any eta voor 1.2?
With the usual timing from the past we should release the beta around September this year. However, because the list of implemented features is so short I'm afraid it may not happen this year.
But we could consider porting the Mailvelope support to 1.1 and release it there.
That would depend on how big this change will be (e.g. keyserver support, etc.). A point for not backporting is that in 1.2 we'd have two PGP solutions - Mailvelope and Enigma - likely together big enough to make 1.2 release on time even if other planned features are delayed.
-
A.L.E.C -
Cor Bosman -
Thomas Bruederli