[neomutt-users] autocrypt? no!

[Sven Guckes]

* Patrick Ben Koetter <p at sys4.de> [2018-01-21 23:54]:
> Has anyone had a look into autocrypt's efforts
> to have more people encrypt email by default?

anyone? yes. you? no.

> Quoting their website:
>
>     What is Autocrypt?
>     Autocrypt is a set of guidelines for developers to
>     achieve convenient end-to-end-encryption of e-mails.
>     It specifies how e-mail programs negotiate
>     encryption capabilities using regular e-mails.
>
>     For users, Autocrypt Level 1 offers single-click, opt-in
>     encryption, eases encrypted group communications, and
>     provides a way to setup encryption on multiple devices.
>     -- https://autocrypt.org/
>
> I myself haven't had the time to study their ideas yet,

may i ask you to take some time for studying this?

> but I noted that some German providers, like Posteo,
> who are very concerned about privacy on the net,
> wrote they will/want to support it.

yay.  but then they do their own "mailprogram", right?
and that mailprogram interfaces with the tools at their end
rather with M tools on N different operating systems - right?

> Should neomutt implement autocrypt?

no.

neomutt is a mail user agent - not a tool to enforce
the installation and configuration of other tools.
i simply cannot and should not enforce a user
to create keys which of course are necessary.

even if you added code for all this
then it needs to work within all
those different OSs out there.
this is not desirable at all.

you may be able to enforce this
when your mailer incorporates
all those other functionality
which is taken by external tools.

but then you end up with a big bloatware
which hardly survives on many platforms.
neomutt as such is big enough already.

as much as ilike the general idea of autocrypt -
implementing all this with neomutt is just too much.

Sven