Clients like Thunderbird are great because you have everything stored locally so you can easily search offline. They also support encrypting and decrypting emails in PGP. However, they seem to have the same limitation as protonmail where you can’t search through encrypted emails.
I know that protonmail can’t just store your key at their server since that would defeat the purpose, so the emails are all ciphertext to them right? But in Thunderbird, you already have the key and decrypt everything all the time. So why can’t you skip the middleman in your local machine and store everything locally in plaintext? It’s not less secure since if your local machine is compromised, your private key is also compromised.
Or at the very least give us the option and have a slightly less secure but much more convenient option.
I’ve been trying to move away from email as a document server.
Anything that’s important / I might want to reference later gets exported to a secure paperless-ngx instance where it’s neatly categorized and easily searched. I then delete it from my inbox.
Came here to ask about paperless and the myriad of versions, even though it’s off topic.
Paperless-ngx installed via docker-compose is super easy. I have it on a luks-encrypted vm only accessible via tailscale.
If you’re in Linux, you can use eCryptfs to setup a private encrypted directory, move the ~/.thunderbird directory into it and just leave a symlink to it in your unencrypted home directory. Then you can store your emails in plain text in the encrypted private directory.
It’s not even complicated to set up: most Linux distributions are setup so that the private directory is automounted upon login: when you’re not logged in, your data at rest is encrypted. It only becomes readable when you’re logged in.
Both my Thunderbird and Firefox directories are stored in my private directory.
Just as it inconveniences you to have to decrypt to search, it would similarly slow down anyone malicious who gains access to your machine.
Am in favour of allowing users to decide which features are best for their needs, but this seems like it would be easy to forget to reinstitute local encryption after a search, so can also understand why developers prevent storing in plaintext.
You can’t search encrypted emails, period. The way I see the benefit of encrypting emails is to not have them compromised in the cloud servers. But on my own machine, if someone gains access to the files, then it’s all ogre. Maybe that’s just me IDK.
Point is, one can decrypt each email individually. That slows an malicious attacker rummaging in your device from finding what they are after as much as it does you.
You wouldn’t be alone in wanting this feature, but for those who need rather than prefer to encrypt, the option to store locally in plaintext is a major risk. On balance it seems better for developers to pay heed to that than to our preferences.
For the rest of us, we can download the emails we wish to refer to with ease, or we can create aides memoire to make it easy to locate specific emails later.
Locally, an attacker still needs to know your password. A strong password can make it too expensive or impractical to brute force.
Protonmail now supports searching in the content of all your mail, though.
Or at least the web client. It will ask you to download all your mail, and it will make an encrypted search index on your computer.
That’s cool but I like to have a central client for all my email providers. I’ve decided to go to fastmail which is good enough for my threat model. The thing that really convinced me is their blog post.
The main thing I care about is the security of the text in transit, and the philosophy of the service I’m using. All respectable mail providers use TLS (even gmail and outlook) but I don’t like their advertiser dependent business model. Proton, tutanota, and I think startmail do respect privacy, but I believe it’s dumb to depend on an external server if you’re that paranoid about your communications that you need to have your email using PGP. Just encrypt your own stuff and tell the other party to do the same. Or self host everything.
