Misc fatal issues, trying to sort out what is known/useful
OpenPGP addon for Mozilla Thunderbird
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Sorry about non-analytic bug reportingsortof post. I restored my ancient Sourceforge account for this purpose since these seem to be Big Issues but I don't have the capacity to track this down enough to make proper bug reports of everything.
Background: I accidentally had a self-updating Enigmail installed as a plugin to Thunderbird 52.7.0 64-bit with the newer functionality AND an older one as an Ubuntu package (2:1.9.9-0ubuntu0.16.04). So some of this behaviour may only appear in a conflict of the two.
I have both S/MIME and PGP configured. S/MIME certificates tend to come from LDAP server. I have other issues with Thunderbird plugins eating all CPU or the entire Thunderbird freezing.
1) Minor usability: I couldn't choose which I prefer to use (S/MIME or PGP) as default - Enigmail will default to PGP but I actually use S/MIME most of the time, and I notice it particularly when sending mail to myself. (I get lonely during the day.) I think this is maybe a missing feature?
2) Work disruption: Editing emails got very slow, I had to wait multiple seconds before I could see what I was typing into a new composer window while the CPU was running hot. I think this has something to do with Enigmail trying to update the little graphical widgets of whether the email is encrypted or not WHILE hammering the occasionally slow LDAP server for certificates for the recipients. Possibly this implies that the GUI update task "priority" would beneift from being able to be in a state of 'determining in the background' rather than checking everything as a blocking operation before I can write a mail.
If my assumption is wrong and the CPU burn comes from some other weird combination of factors, I'm not sure if it helps to make a bug report though.
3) GUI corruption 1: so I had to disable Enigmail-the-plugin to be able to handle my regular mails and only enable it when processing PGP mail. This made my preview pane's "reply/forward/senders/subject" GUI element vanish. I.e. preview pane only contained the window containing the email content, not the 'header view'. This may be due to an unclean handover back to the builtin system for drawing the little encrypted/not encrypted icons on the header view when the plugin is disabled. If it can only be reproduced without enigmail-as-a-package, then this is not interesting enough to report as a bug.
(The disabling does not warn that Thunderbird needs to be restarted, so I didn't, since heavens know it's hard enough to get it running again once I stop it. ;))
4) GUI corruption 2: This part was disturbing. (Recall that I have now two enigmails on top of each other, one is disabled, the other is "invisible" from the add-on handler but still there.) I disable Enigmail and gain back in composer window the S/MIME control widget.
Only even though I select to encrypt and sign the message, it will be happily sent UNencrypted and UNsigned. Without any warning.
If this can be reproduced without Enigmail installed as a package, it's a signal that the plugin disabling really needs a forced restart or cleaner handover back to the regular encryption handling.
5) Encryption support corruption: When I noticed this, I clicked on the S/MIME widget of one mail being composed for its current encryption status, and it said encryption is "not possible". Something broke down from disabling Enigmail that shouldn't.
6) The really creepy part that was entirely "my fault" was that even after I had disabled Enigmail AND restarted Thunderbird, UI elements like the main menu dropdown would not go away. :D I think this one was caused by the underlying "native" Enigmail installation. As the only conclusion I can draw from this one, would it be possible for the 'plugin Enigmail' to detect the 'native Enigmail' and give the user a warning about the collision?
I greatly appreciate all usability improvements possible to email encryption and am a long-time user of Enigmail. It will take me time to build some kind of lab setup to be able to test the reproducibility of these and I can't just install a fresh Thunderbird or fresh Enigmail on the primary email handler for 'trying stuff out', sadly. So feedback on what is already known to not be related to this or otherwise irrelevant would be very useful.
It's certainly a bad idea to have Enigmail installed twice. This will lead to conflicts and unforeseen results. It's mandatory that you get rid of one of the addons.
You can set this in the Account Manager for each account in the "OpenPGP settings" tab.
This is most likely the consquence of the "two addons" issue.
There is no such thing as a "handover for drawing". Enigmail only adds some GUI elements, it does not modify or remove any of the builtin buttons, views etc, and it does not replace some Thunderbird functionality. I'd recommend that you restart Thunderbird.
See above. I strongly recommend to restart Thunderbird in this situation.
No, that's not possible. The fact that Thunderbird allows parallel installations of two addons already tells you that it's not prepared for this scenario.