[Mailman-Developers] Encrypted lists predictable difficulties and implementation needs

[Norbert Bollow]

On Wed, 22 Mar 2017 21:15:46 -0400
Barry Warsaw <barry at list.org> wrote:

> Is anybody even aware of any mainstream mobile email readers that
> support encryption?

One of my friends uses K9 on his Samsung mobile phone; it works fine for
him, allowing him to exchange GPG-encrypted emails with me.

If you need more examples, I could ask on the (encrypted,
Schleuder-based) internal mailing list of Digital Society Switzerland.

> An encrypted mailing list won't help you much regardless of the
> compromised nature of your device if you can't even read the
> encrypted messages. ;)

Personally I prefer to use my mobile phone for plain old telephony and
SMS only; I lovingly refer to it as "my dumbphone". I believe that the
risk of compromise is much, much lower than for Internet-connected
smartphones, even without taking any special security precautions in
relation to the dumbphone.

By contrast, a laptop running Debian GNU/Linux can be kept secure enough
for my needs without too much trouble even while communicating via the
Internet with somewhat-trusted as well as with totally untrusted third
parties.

That is good enough for me, because I don't have a need to be online
continually while awake; it suffices for me to be able to ensure that
I'll be able to live up to a commitment of having promised 24hrs
turn-around reaction time for anything that may be relatively urgent. A
laptop computer is sufficiently mobile for ensuring that, as long as I
don't travel to really remote areas.

Greetings,
Norbert