Everything In Between

I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird as my default (and only) email client application on my Windoze laptop for a while now. (It’s far better for email than Outlook in just about every way.) I’ve also been using the Enigmail encrypted email extension. I’ve even been able to get my mother into using it to send me sensitive emails, such as when she wants me to order something for her on Amazon.com and needs to give me her credit card number to do so.

This has a number of advantages:

1. The message’s security is on-par with some of the best privacy encryption around. The telephone is a surprisingly easy communication channel to compromise. At least sending an encrypted email (assuming keyloggers aren’t present on a compromised system and assuming the private keys are kept safe) will take some more intense computational power to crack.
2. I’m basically guaranteed to recieve the communiqué; my cell phone provider has the worst reception and delays imagineable. I’m always available by email, however, because I check it as if I’m paranoid.
3. Best of all, my mother need not call me as often as she once has. (No offense, I love you Mom.)

Anyway, the point is that I had wanted to now integrate GPG with Apple’s Mail.app, had heard about GPGMail, but was worried that it wouldn’t work because it says it needs MacGPG, and I have Fink’s GPG port.

Being the blatantly insubordinate individual and anti-authoritarian that I am, I decided to try to work with it anyway and see what would break. So I installed GPGMail and launched Mail.app. I was presented with the error, “Invalid crypto engine! GPGMail cannot work. It didn’t find GnuPG (/usr/local/bin/gpg) with at least version 1.2.2. Please quit Mail, blah blah blah blah!”

So, thinking that maybe that path was just hardcoded into GPGMail, I created a symbolic link from /usr/local/bin/gpg which pointed to my Fink gpg installation at /sw/bin/gpg.

sudo ln -s /sw/bin/gpg /usr/local/bin/gpg

Much to my delight, it worked wonderfully. Luckily, it turns out that GPGMail can work just fine with GPG ports other than MacGPG. You just have to tell it where your gpg executable is.