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Comment by markwakeford | Hacker News Reader

I am curious as to to know what mail clients people are using with GPG. In OSX I am not a big fan of the native mail client at all but it seems thats the only approach if you want to use GPG. I am currently on a quest to find a decent mail client that looks good and works well and I am currently trialling Airmail 2 but its GPG support is buggy at best.

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I used Thunderbird and Enigmail for a year or so. I later moved to Evolution for the better GPG experience (no flickering on opening the message as there is with Enigmail) and better GNOME integration. I used Evolution for another year, but its rough edges wore me down; I had to get in the habit of closing it if I wasn't using it, because it would noticeably slow my system down. It would take at least 5 seconds to open. Parts of the UI would often lock up and need a reset by switching between the panes.

I've been using Claws Mail for the past few months. It's simple, fast and stable, and GPG support is fine. That's all I need. It sucks for reading and writing HTML emails, but I'm okay with that. Parts of the UI are still rough (e.g. the main window isn't responsive while the "sending" dialog is open), but it's less worse than Evolution.

In previous years I've had GPG/PGP configured, but not had anyone to write to or anything to write about.

We need entry-level e-mail clients to have GPG/PGP built in. Your post highlights the need to select a client which is why GPG/PGP has a niche user-base who send dull e-mail to Internet Celebrities who happen to share public keys. I mean my parents e-mail client, which would naturally be the default for their operating system (yes, Windows Live Mail), should have in-built GPG/PGP capability and the address book should auto encrypt any messages to me with the public key in my "contact" info, and decrypt any from me with their private key which is created and stored without them even realizing (as SSH does). It's hard to select an e-mail client anyway, but convincing my parents to select an e-mail client and/or plug-in, isn't going to happen.

I've been puzzled why fat clients traditionally have S/MIME built in, but certificates are complex to obtain, and don't have GPG/PGP with easy to create keys.

For encryption to be pervasive, it has to support all clients, on all platforms, without explicit user action. We can talk all day about the UX of tools like PGP but the bottom line is that the UX for email are mail client(s), and nothing else.

Strong crypto for emails has to work like https does for web browsing. Picture if people had to use some command line tool to generate and keep keys in order to do online shopping in their web browser. Compared to just using a (any) browser with https built in.

The amount of people that would want to use some native desktop email client for ALL their email work is likely even smaller than the number that use GPG today! If I couldn't read my email on my phone or on any computer it would have lost most of its value already.

I use Thunderbird with Enigmail, but for some reason it wants to load up thousands of archived emails and crashes my computer. It is annoying as fuck.

While I really enjoy reading and sending encrypted emails, and think it's far better than sending sensitive data in the clear, I am surprised to learn that there are people who use PGP and don't hate it or have issues with it.

If you're not afraid of NCurses, sup (http://supmua.org/) manages GPG.

I have been using Thunderbird (with Enigmail plugin) for over a decade now. Never had any issues.

Other than using an email client application rather than a web application.

Enigmail is good though.

Mailpile (https://www.mailpile.is/). It's pretty bare-bones as far as a mail client goes, but it gets the job done.

Thunderbird & Enigmail. 7/10 would encrypt again.

I use KMail and the GPG integration is beautiful. But I can't speak to what KDE looks like on OSX.

mutt has excellent GPG support.

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