Encrypting everything online is becoming more important by the day. Email is no different. For Linux users, the process is actually very simple with three common open source tools; Mozilla Thunderbird, Enigmail, and GNU PGP(GPG.)
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://linuxconfig.org/encrypt-your-email-with-gpg-thunderbird-and-enigmail
elder_geek
I am most interested in the deeper aspects. As far as I know, the email remains encrypted. While this is good in that if your email is hosted on line at google or yahoo, it is still secure.
On the other hand it also makes your email worthless for searching. Try encrypting all email between yourself and several contacts for a few years, then find an important email after 6 months.
Is there some way to have IMAP email remain encrypted on the server, but if you use a client like Thunderbird to have the local copy unencrypted?
Traditionalist
I have an issue, or just a question. I’m using Ubuntu 18.04 / Thunderbird / Enigmail / GPG - for email encryption. I’ve been using the same setup on Windows so I’m familiar with it and it works well. But on Ubuntu the key management package (gpa) is creating a key-pair for each of my email addresses…automatically. I’ve deleted them but they just come back again. Is this by design? What’s the point of it?