[Gpg4win-devel] GPGol Questions

[Werner Koch]

On Fri, 14 Apr 2006 15:03:42 -0500, Alan Jones said:

> It was suggested that I send this message to this group....

First of all, please take my apologies for taking so long to reply.

> 1. An option and associated icons could be added so that using Word as
> the default editor in Plain Text mode would easily allow for signing
> and/or encrypting mail?

That seem not to be possible unless we write a GnuPG extension for
Word or somehow get information on ho to properly hook into the
sending process.  What we currently do is kind of a hack.  All
research didn't revealed a better way on integrating GnuPG.  For sure
there will be a way, but the people from teh Redmond towers don't tell
us.

> 2. An option that a message could be written with Word as the default
> editor even in HTML mode. Then have associated warnings and optional
> conversion to convert the message back to text.  I have seen Enigmail
> for Thunderbird do this.  It is very nice.
> Enigmail also has an option to rewrap signed HTML text before sending.

Closely relates to your first question.  We don't know how to do this.

> 3. If the above two options are not possible what about an icon on the
> main Outlook tool bar and associated text that says "Write a new GnuPG
> message"?  This would start the Outlook Editor even if Word was set as
> the default editor for Outlook?  That way those of us that liked Word as
> the default for most stuff could still easily get to the Outlook editor
> for GnuPG related items.  I was hoping this option could be easy enough
> that it could be something added in a near release.

That seems to be possible, however we need to figure out a way to
change the configuration of Outlook temporally by the Plugin.  That
would be a hack tou, but should work.  I looked at this recently but
found no clean way of doing it.  Any help is greatly expected.

For Enigmail it is far easier - itself as well as Thunderbird are Free
Software and there are no secrets.

> On an unrelated note what does the check box option "Show HTML version
> is possible" mean in GnuPG Options dialog?  How does that work?

If a message comes in a Text and HTML version (multipart/alternative),
i.e. when you opt for sending HTML mails with newer version of
Outlook.  GPGol will try to display the (decrypted) HTML version of
the message.  Default is to show the text version of the message.

> Please consider adding a few  more options like key singing rules like
> Enigmail has.

Noted.

> Any chance of getting GPGol to work on older versions of Outlook?   I
> know it was stared that anything lower then 2003 with SP2 was to buggy,
> but sometimes I know new thoughts and ides will come up.

It seems to work with some versions but nit reliable.  We can't do
much about it.  Even worse: We can't reliable detect whether it is
OL2003 or OL2002 - there is report that OL2002SP4 (?) claimes to be
OL2003SP2 but it is different.

> Does anyone know of GPGol would work with the new Outlook 12 aka Outlook
> 2007 or are there plans to test this with the current Microsoft Betas?

Probably.  However, we don't have an Outlook 12 here and the primary
goal is to make the current version usuable for OL2003.

> If you all later support multiple versions of Outlook (older or newer)
> please consider an option to install GPGol on multiple Outlook
> installations on the same machine.  On some machines I end up running
> multiple versions of MS Office (I know that can be tricky with some MS
> Office apps).

I am not sure whether this can be made explicit.  GPGol registers
itself with Outlook using the Registry key

 HKLM\\Software\\Microsoft\\Exchange\\Client\\Extensions

and a magic vesion number of 4.0.  AFAICS, this affects all Outlook
versions.

> Would it be worth making the g10 Code page for GPGol a little more
> generic without the version number and just a link to the files listing
> ftp://ftp.g10code.com/g10code/gpgol/
> and a link to the Gpg4win site?

I have changed this in the meantime.



Salam-Shalom,

   Werner