S/MIME support in E-Mail

answered 2017-10-03 01:07:47 +0300

olf
10393 ●104 ●201 ●158

updated 2017-11-05 08:06:54 +0300

Note, that this is different from the requested OpenPGP (RFC4880) support.

S/MIME and OpenPGP are the two major email encryption standards, and equally important: S/MIME is primarily used in corporate environments, OpenPGP primarily in personal environments (I actually use both).

Also note, that aforementioned request for "gpg support" is actually a misnomer:

• GnuPG ("gpg") is already always installed as a part of SailfishOS for checking RPM signatures, as it is used by the CLI tools rpm, pkcon, zypper etc.

• The GnuPG framework provides support for both, the OpenPGP standard (as defined in RFC4880) and X.509 / S/MIME.

And note, that all necessary elements of the GnuPG framework are already there:

• gpg, libgcrypt, libgpg-error etc. are official packages in the SailfishOS repositories.

• gpgme is available in the mer-tools repository (see in the mer-obs, but use ssu ar mer-tools) for SailfishOS (apparently also compiled and packaged by Jolla).

• A compiled libassuan currently seems to be missing (in the repositories maintained by Jolla), but its source and -devel packages are available in the SailfishOS repositories. Though a compiled libassuan0 can be found in nielDK's mer-obs repo.

• pinentry is available in Inte's repository  on OpenRepos.net, although this is the CLI version, not pinentry-qt (i.e. one of the two GUI versions, pinentry-gtk being the other).

But it would actually make a lot of sense to update the GnuPG framework to a recent version (i.e. with gpg 2.2.x) first, before starting with the creation of GUI elements and their integration into the Jolla email client, as already addressed in the mer-meetings 2017-09-06 (08:59:37 ff.) and 2017-09-20 (08:34:31 abranson mentioning "dcaliste's brilliant GPG contribs to the email client", which Damien Caliste himself describes in detail here).
Though presumably it is a political decision by Jolla to use an outdated GnuPG version (with multiple known security vulnerabilities) in SailfishOS, as the currently available version of GnuPG / gpg is the last version released under GPLv2+ (GnuPG switched to GPLv3-only years ago).

Edit: yeoldegrove has compiled and the GnuPG framework ("gpg suite") in its recent version(s) for SailfishOS and released it 2017-11-04 on OpenRepos.