Email on vxlabs

OpenPGP WKD for easy PGP key discovery

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 08:01:57 +0200

Web Key Directory (WKD) “is a standard for discovery of OpenPGP keys by email address, via the domain of its email provider”.

In short, through some DNS and files-on-your-webserver conventions, some email clients (e.g. Thunderbird or ProtonMail) and tools like GnuPG are able to retrieve your PGP keys automatically. This is of course super convenient and desirable for your correspondents, because PGP encryption is hard enough as it is.

OpenPGP makes this even better by offering “WKD as a service”, which means you only have to do the DNS bits, and not the files-on-your-webserver bits.

Configure Thunderbird 128 e2e encryption with GnuPG

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 13:55:52 +0200

It took me longer than I would have liked to setup the latest Thunderbird 128 (Supernova!) to use my existing GnuPG-based encryption setup, for a large part because TB defaults to its own more straight-forward built-in defaults for key management, and so I’m going to publish the recipe here to save you some time, hopefully.

All the details, at various levels of obviousness, can be found on this Mozilla wiki page, but here I’m going to make the whole sequence more obvious.

Open message:// links with mu4e or fastmail

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 12:15:00 +0200

This is a small variation of the 2019 post on linking to emails from Org mode using Thunderbird, where instead we show how to open the message:// links with mu4e if active, or the fastmail web-app if it is not.

You might remember that message://msg-id-here links represent one of the better ways to link to emails from your PKM systems.

Code

Below is the code. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.

Improve the plaintext email experience through format=flowed with long lines.

Sun, 25 Aug 2019 19:20:00 +0200

TL;DR.

In this post, I propose bending the format=flowed RFC by allowing lines up to the SMTP limit of 998 characters, in order to improve the plaintext reading experience for users of non-compliant email clients and services, such as GMail, FastMail, Outlook and others.

Background.

The format=flowed plaintext email convention described in RFC3676 is an elegant method whereby plaintext emails can be prepared in such a way so that they are wrapped correctly on older email clients, but they can also be reflowed by modern clients supporting that part of the standard.

Link directly to emails from Emacs Orgmode using Thunderbird and Thunderlink

Sat, 20 Apr 2019 21:40:00 +0200

On macOS, links of the form message://message-id are by default supported by the system.

Using a tool such as org-mac-link, it is straight-forward to link directly to relevant emails from Orgmode tasks and notes.

It does not matter if you have moved the mail around. When you open the link from Orgmode, the relevant email is instantly shown in Mac mail.

Fortunately, similar functionality can be configured on Windows and Linux using the Thunderbird mail client, an add-on called ThunderLink, and a touch of Emacs Lisp.