Sequoia Octopus OpenPGP Mail Encryption for Thunderbird is now available

25 April 2021, 20:34:04

Sequoia Octopus OpenPGP Mail Encryption for Thunderbird is now available as package sequoia-octopus-librnp in the Artix Universe repo.

According to https://sequoia-pgp.org/blog/2021/04/08/202103-a-new-backend-for-thunderbird/ the Sequoia Octopus OpenPGP library is:

Super powering end-to-end email encryption in Mozilla Thunderbird

Warning and known limitations from the project itself:

WARNING WARNING WARNING
This is a young project. Use it with caution with your production Thunderbird profile and production keys, and make sure you have a backup (of at least pubring.gpg, secring.gpg, and openpgp.sqlite) and know how to recover.

Known limitations

There may be dragons.
When Thunderbird auto-updates, it overwrites the Octopus' version of librnp.so with its own version. This issue has been reported to Thunderbird.
Thunderbird reads and caches the available certificates on startup. Thus if you add a new certificate to gpg, even though the Octopus
will load it, Thunderbird will not notice it until either you manually reimport the keys using Thunderbird's OpenPGP Keyring Manager, File, Reload Key Cache, or you restart Thunderbird.

Note: Thunderbird only caches the list of keys and some meta-data, so it will normally take advantage of any updates inserted into the gpg keystore or fetched via Parcimonie.

To install and activate:

Move file /usr/lib/thunderbird/librnp.so to another location
Install package sequoia-octopus-librnp
ln -s /usr/lib/sequoia-octopus-librnp/libsequoia_octopus_librnp.so /usr/lib/thunderbird/librnp.so

Note: Thunderbird updates replace /usr/lib/thunderbird/librnp.so requiring redo of the above steps

To verify if the Sequoia Octopus OpenPGP library is being used, start Thunderbird from the command line; the output should show a line like:
console.debug: "Successfully loaded OpenPGP library librnp.so version 1.0.1+sequoia-openpgp-1.1.0 from /usr/lib/thunderbird/librnp.so"

For information on how to enable the universe repository check https://wiki.artixlinux.org/Main/Repositories