Popular PGP Email add-on Enigmail addresses security gaps

You might be familiar with Enigmail, the popular add-on to the Thunderbird email program that allows public-key encryption of email. If you haven't heard of it, it's worth investigating - Enigmail is an important upgrade to your email experience. And if you're already using it then you should upgrade, because several encryption flaws were found, and have recently been patched.

An Enigmail user who reported one of the encryption failures in version 1.7 on the project's support forum described the situation as "the biggest imaginable catastrophe."

"I am currently preparing a crypto class for journalists next week to teach them how to use safe email," the user wrote. "HOW am I going to explain that? A system tells the user in a separate window as well as in a menu line that everything will be encrypted but then it simply FORGOT to ENCRYPT and, ooops, their report will be intercepted and their source will be tortured?"

That's a bit hyperbolic perhaps. But it's still a good time to keep your encryption up to date. Unless you agree with security researcher Matthew Green, who thinks PGP sucks and it's time for it to die.