Installation note on Enigmail 0.94.1

Just a quick tech note, for anyone who (like me) has been having trouble using Enigmail 0.94.1 on their Mac since upgrading to the latest Thunderbird (1.5.0.7). I spent a few days with only command-line access to GPG, because the new upgrade kept giving me the message: “Engimail 0.94.1 could not be installed because it is incompatible with Firefox.”

The new upgrade works – it’s just a bit counterintuitive. Instead of installing from Firefox, you need to download the XPI file from the site, save it to your hard drive, then install it from within Thunderbird, under the Tools -> Extensions -> Install menu. I found that I couldn’t download the XPI from Firefox – I ended up firing up Safari to download it, then was able to install without problems. While you’re at it, you might want to upgrade GPG to the latest version – 1.4.5 of GNU Privacy Guard – which is a very easy install, a DMG and an installer package.

For those of you not using Enigmail – it’s really the easiest PGP solution I’ve found so far, easier than using Hushmail, I find. A number of projects I work on have moved to using PGP encryption for sharing sensitive documents – I wondered if this would die out, as almost every move towards PGP I’ve seen in the past has ended when one or more of the folks in a group weren’t able to find a solution that let them read their PGP-encrypted email easily. Enigmail is the first solution I’ve seen to cross that barrier. While I still don’t like Thunderbird as much as my old Eudora, Enigmail makes it my client of choice.

(Just a warning for my less geeky readers – I’m giving a workshop later this week with Roger Dingledine of Tor fame, and we’re likely to have a few more technical posts than usual as I prepare slides and notes for that talk…)