[…] managing them. It’s just annoying because the tools we have aren’t all that great, the integration with mail clients has been shitty for years and actually keeping track of your keys is a pain in the […]

Oh my, is it 2014 already? Thanks @ From the Future for triggering an update. I don’t even remember posting in this thread, but I’m sure back in good ol’ 2008 the year 2014 must have seemed far away. Hey, Tino from 2008, you know all those things you worry about? Well, most of them work out ok, try not to stress out too much.

As for my prediction, i.e., that Luke swaps his users over to Linux around 2014; well, a massive amount of regular people are using Linux on a daily basis now (the first phone with Android was launched in 2008, no less), so, meh, maybe I should count that prediction as a win. :).

Lets up the ante for 2020 (i.e., + 6 more years): we’ll have computers embedded inside our bodies, and no one is going to run Microsoft software on them.

Hey, Tino from 2020, I hope you’ll find your way back here, and that everything will have had worked out for the best. (cf., Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations.)

And Luke, I hope you did get that startup launched. But if not, best of luck in the race for 2020!

@ Luke Maciak:

2014 is here..where is your “revolutionary startup”?

Well, I started to look for a safe way to send emails three hours ago. I installed gpg4win, read the first pages of the manual, made a public key, downloaded Outlook Privacy Plugin, installed that too and sent and decrypted several mails with Outlook 2013 since.

Even though its an old thread, you should look into that.

Nice article and I came to the same conclusion: I found no “enterprise” viable solution for integrating Outlook and GPG.

As a proof of concept I successfully installed SeaMonkey browser/email reader with enigmail and it was working very well with Gmail.
Now: Is it viable to a company which decided to use MS-Outlook for emails ? probably not.

A question remains for me: if a company is able to pay hundreds thousands (if not milions) of dollars to Microsoft to use their programs (I guess they do not use only Outlook but probably the whole MS-Office suite, why do they talk aout cost of another software which is very well integrated (i used it in a company and it was the best outlook integration).
If they decide to throw away MS and start using Linux and OpenOffice, the cost of license would be smaller but the maintenance and user support will certainly cost more.

Example: 1’000 license PGP = ~140’000 dollars annually.
Think about how much people you need to maintain a clumsy solution based on open source software and how much they would cost to the company?
Another point: if they do not have such money, then the security is probably not a urgent issue: you have to balance between the security costs and (recovery cost (or loss of income in case of data stealing) + probability to be hacked/stealed )

I am not against OpenSource and I use many ( I am mainly programming in Java), but the idea (illusion) that it cost nothing is very strong in the people from management in general and this idea is just not realistic.

Thank you VERRYYY MUCH! I installed GPG and it didn’t work at first because it was indeed using WORD as the default editor. I turned it to plain text and it now works like magic, seamlessly!

John H. Mountcastle wrote:

I use GPG4Win, works like a dream, install was a breeze. integrates smoothly with Outlook. The only shortcoming I’ve found is that it won”t work while you use Word for youe email composition, so, just flip over to the built in word processor when you need to use encryption. You can switch back and forth between Word and the native processor with a click or two under Tools/Options/somethingorother. Give it a try. It’s worth the twenty minutes it will take you to install it and you can be sending encrypted emails for free, in no time.

As if all this isn’t enough, it comes with an additional component that inserts itself into the right mouse click menu to encrypt decrypt files right from the file explorer. It’s so intuitive it hardly needs documentation which as it turns out is a good thing because there hardly is any.

Somewhat related to the Office addiction thing: if your company is addicted to Exchange for whatever reason, but you’d like to use Thunderbird or other nice clients instead of Outlook, I came across DavMail the other day. Not tried it, but looks like a good idea to me :-)

Russ

David Cumps:
Does the plugin work with OE?
or
Can it be made to?

@ davidr521:

You probably found something else, the site for the product I was referring to is http://www.gwebs.com/

@ J:

How? According to their website, they support webmail only.