A few days ago, Mozilla announced that it will be adding support for the well-known OpenPGP encryption standard to email client , Thunderbird. Mozilla Thunderbird is an open source application that aims to manage email, news feeds, chats and newsgroups and is available for free for multiple platforms.
The new addition will arrive with version v78 in the summer of 2020. We remind that the current version of Thunderbird is v68.1.1.
OpenPGP is an encryption standard for email communications and was derived from Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), an application developed in the early 1990s also for email.
Using OpenPGP in emails is a complex process that involves managing cryptographic keys, signing them, and then encrypting the content of the emails using a command-line interface.
Over the years, developers have developed specialized software to automate and simplify the above process, making email encryption possible even for users unfamiliar with the technology. To this day, the only way to use OpenPGP in Thunderbird is through an add-on called Enigmail.
In December 2017, Mozilla announced that it would be upgrading the Thunderbird codebase. This upgrade will affect both the Thunderbird add-on APIs and, consequently, the APIs that Enigmail uses to interact with Thunderbird. As a result, Enigmail will not work in future versions of Thunderbird, with the v68.x branch being the last to support it.
For Enigmail users, version v78 of Thunderbird will provide assistance for migrating cryptographic keys and settings. Aiming to strengthen secure communication, the same version will “encourage” users to verify the ownership of the keys used by participants and will notify the user in case of a sudden change of a participant's key and will help them resolve the issue.
It is not yet certain whether this version will support the implicit key signatures used in the Web of Trust (WoT) model. The only thing that is certain is that it will support the ability to share user-generated key signatures and the ability to interact with OpenPGP key servers
Users who have not previously used Enigmail must explicitly state their desire to use OpenPGP for encryption purposes
More information about the upcoming change to Thunderbird can be found on the official Mozilla wiki. We look forward to your feedback…
