Hello and good evening :)
I'd like to make a request for updating Becky! Internet Mail's GPG plugin, which
just happens to be usable still (though not quite fully) 16 years after it's
last official release.
The reason for me picking up this one particular e-mail client is not just
personal preference alone, but rather the necessity that GPG users like myself
have for a Windows system that wasn't designed from the ground up to comply with
PRISM, which unfortunately leaves out everything Microsoft developed from Vista
onward. So as it stands right now, you either "upgrade" to an irreparably
compromised OS that can handle modern GPG-powered software like Enigmail or do
it all by hand on a safer, legacy alternative like Windows XP.
And without any desire to drag this out into an OS war, Windows XP is in my
estimation, the last Windows OS that can be effectively tweaked, modified and
hardened to stand secured against the hostility of 2020's internet, and if you
know exactly what you're doing, that's done without sacrificing any
compatibility (spanning nearly 30 years worth of Windows software running
natively), usability or performance.
Now on the plugin. It does work for encryption, but signing and verifying are
broken if anything other than SHA-1 or MD5 is used, and that cannot be changed
by the user at all.
The options offered by the panel is mostly functionality (some of it deprecated)
that's best left to gpg.conf, but they can be safely ignored.
In other words, only the ability to handle better digest algorithms is needed for
the plugin to operate adequately, with the rest falling more or less in the realm
of cosmetics.
The plugin is, of course, open source and doesn't seem to be particularly
complicated considering that it just calls gpg.exe and passes the commands
directly as you would when working from the CLI,, but unfortunately what little
I know of the C language at this moment, is not sufficient to take on this task,
so I'm forced to kindly request this much be done for the sake of people in
need of an e-mail client that works with GnuPG on a legacy Windows OS.
Becky!'s been in continuous development for 24 years, runs perfectly on any
Windows platform ranging from 95 all the way up to 10 and quite frankly it's an
excellent piece of software that's served me and many others well for a long
time, much like GnuPG itself.
Best regards and sorry if I've overstayed my welcome with this post.
...
Becky! Internet Mail: https://www.rimarts.co.jp/becky.htm
GNU Privacy Guard Plug-in for Becky! 2:
http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA023900/gpg-pin/index_en.html