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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

I remember back in the 90s exchanging PGP keys with my roommate to exchange encrypted emails. It was supposed to be so easy. Just 12 simple steps. Every time.

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at least you had a friend to email! I couldn't get any of my friends to do it. "Man we can encrypt our emails." "But why..." "It'd be cool" "This seems hard." "Come on, exchange keys with me." "I don't want to make one."

My high school friends and I settled for using Gain and Pidgin to enable the "secure" icon. :)

For awhile you could use Pidgin and OTR to even have secure messages through facebook's messenger. I'm not sure if they decrypted it or not, but it sure was fun.

Reminded me of my Adium days.

Back when I liked my messenger app on the Mac.

Apple has tried hard to degrade the experience of their built in messenger.

Been a hot minute since I've thought about Gaim. Thanks for the memories.

Yep, I meant Gaim. Damn you, autocorrect!

Gaim is just Pidgin's original name.

I assume he first used it when it was called Gaim, so he has stronger memories associated with that name than with Pidgin.

Ah, the good old days when I could just plug my IM services into one desktop app. I miss those days very much.

Now I use three Electron apps on a typical work day.

Matrix bridges do that for me today! Currently using IRC and Telegram bridges, thinking about adding Slack.

Sadly, Electron-based Element is still the best Matrix client by far.

The lack of thread support in Element makes Slack bridging very hard to use, sadly.

I needed some time to figure out you're not talking about multithreading in JavaScript/electron, but about this

https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/2349

I still use Pidgin for Skype and Hangouts. For text only it's perfect:

- https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/purple-hangouts-git/ - https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/purple-skypeweb-git/

Works even on old and crappy computers.

Rambox and Franz both do this today. They are electron apps but you only need one for all your services.

PGPs trust levels are what made PGP never take off: even laypersons could see this is theater, not security.

For reasons unclear to me Thunderbird chose not to go with something like autocrypt.org, but stick with standard PGP and implement parts of their attempt to simplify, which isn't nearly enough to get regular users on board, never mind implement things like forward security, which autocrypt does.

A missed chance from Mozilla, secure email would fit in well with their mission.

There is an autocrypt plugin for Thunderbird:

* https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/autoc...

Now that most SMTP connections are encrypted with STARTTLS on the wire, autocrypt is not that valuable. At an email server autocrypt can be trivially man in the middled with just a simple script. It ends up being just another encrypted messaging solution that skips the hard but crucial problem of identity.

Added: Autocrypt does not do forward secrecy. Most people want to keep their old emails, so forward secrecy wouldn't add much value:

* https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:forward_secrecy

I know, and I use it. It however wont support TB 78.

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