Despair Not, Use PGP and GPG in Parallel

I’ve been getting a lot of queries about why I’m calling in for a boycott of PGP Desktop. This sounds eerily familiar from the logic courses where they teach about the fallacy of hidden premises. In this case two of those.

For starters, as a long time and present user of PGP Desktop for Windows, I’ve never experienced any difficulty. Moreover I highly recommend it as the only truly viable and still reasonably priced alternative out in the market. My problems only pertain to the Mac version. Secondly, I’m not trying to dissuade anyone from using PGP Desktop for Mac. I have two main messages:

- If you have not entrusted your data to PGP Desktop for Mac yet and are intending to do so, just beware that it’s a serious decision with potentially lethal consequences. You might be able to deal with them successfully (as I have been), or not.

- If you are deeply bogged into PGP Desktop for Mac, there is hope. You can try the open-source alternative GPG. In fact, I recommend using both in parallel as I do presently.

Mail Bundle Still Sucks, Say Some Users

A couple of early movers now say they won’t use the Mail Bundle that comes with PGP Desktop for Mac 9.7. Dissatisfied users say the Mail Bundle caused significant stability issues with Mail.app. On my side, things appear to be working well so I and a couple of contacts are happily sticking to the bundle. We’ve recommended other users to contact both Apple and PGP Corporation on the stability problems they’ve faced.

Flash… Flash.. Flash… PGP Mail Bundle Back in Play

We have now multiple confirmed reports that PGP Desktop for Mac 9.7 works stably without any issues under Leopard. To the delight of previously-disappointed customers, PGP Corporation seems to have decided to put back the Mail Bundle plug-in as well. While it comes with the usual warnings of being unsupported, a dozen users have confirmed to us that they have been using it without any problems for more than a week now. Users are thankful to the PGP corporation for the recent corrective actions taken.

Breaking News: PGP Desktop 9.7 Released, Seems to Work

Whatever PGP Corp might think of this consumer anger web site, we are an honest bunch.

We have just heard from multiple sources that as of early this morning, PGP Corporation began sending e-mail alerts notifying PGP users of the immediate release of 9.7. Apparently the upgrade applies to both Win and Mac versions.

A couple of early users confirmed to us that they were able to install 9.7 and use its main functions of PGP Disk, PGP Zip files and Shred without a shred of instability that plagued earlier versions of PGP on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

One user was happy to report to see even the Main Bundle to be back in play! She was not sure if it worked as she was waiting for the West Coast to wake up and respond to trial messages.

If all this is confirmed, and this blog will follow up with developments, we will retract some of the harshest criticism we have leveled against PGP Corp. All we wanted was for them to listen to furious PGP users and get their act together.

We will continue to propose GPG as a viable alternative for people who are not bogged down in the intricacies of PGP.

However, if confirmed, last night’s developments should be a sign that finally someone at PGP took the whip in hand and decided to put an end to all that techie-geekie approach of turning a deaf ear to customer cries.

Where to Find PGP Mac 9.7 Beta

Switched to Leopard? Would like to try Mac PGP 9.7 Beta?

The best way to locate PGP Mac 9.7 Beta is to browse through PGP Community Forums. This should take you to the right place to start.

You may also wish to check PGP beta downloads page.

What Happened When a PGP Desktop User Upgraded to Leopard

If you are using Tiger and PGP Desktop, you may be on the brink of disaster so read on.

I’ll merely describe what happened to me so this is not fantasy.

Let me describe where I was first.

My personal data security is not much of a concern. However, as a media and IT consultant, I keep a lot of confidential financial data belonging to my clients. That’s what I worry about. As PGP Corporation’s PGP Desktop is the only commercially supported and reasonably priced alternative I know, I’ve kept my data secured in the following ways:

PGP Disk: As a locked-up repository of large amounts of confidential data.

E-mails secured with PGP’s mail bundle: A few of my clients prefer to send me PGP encrypted data only. My whole comms with them are archived in this way.

PGP encrypted individual files. That’s where I store my passwords for example.

Pretty damning, huh? Indeed. And imagine losing access to part or even whole of that data.

Indeed that’s what happened when I upgraded to Leopard. (Of course I first made a bootable backup of my Tiger system using SuperDuper.) So in a way I’m always safe. Whatever working condition my system is, if Leopard does not work for me, I can at least boot back to Tiger from an external firewire disk and rescue my data.

As soon as I installed Leopard, I tried the latest PGP Desktop I have: 9.5. (I had lost hope of 9.6 because PGP disabled the vital mail bundle in 9.6 - without any prior warning!)

App itself: When I tried firing it up, nothing happened. The app seemed to be launching and then disappearing to oblivion. This app certainly was not going to work.

Disk: Tried to mount my current PGP Disk, same failure.

Mails: Since there was no mail bundle anymore, I had no way of accessing thousands of locked e-mails.

My passwords on PGP encrypted file. As I could not fire up PGP Desktop, that was a lost cause too.

Can you imagine the shock and anger?

Leopard was fantastic and I was being kept away from it for the sake of one badly done and badly supported application.

In the name of being fair, I must say I sustained my PGP communication still with the help of PGP. Now hold your breath: This is both exciting and useful: I fished in my hard disk for the oldest PGP Desktop I’ve ever bought: 8.1. Yes, it worked albeit partially. At least I was able to install it, import my keys, and use it to decrypt and encrypt text files!

So if you happen to have switched to Leopard and feeling miserable as I did, you might hunt for an 8.1 to relieve your pain partially.

I remain puzzled that 8.1 would work on OS X 10.5 but 9.6 would not. What’re the PGP Corporation guys smoking?

If you haven’t switched yet, please move on to the next few posts as you’ll find useful information to save you from a lot of headaches - and hopefully from PGP too.

Also, I always keep a working PC complete with the latest PGP always by my side. Yes, dear PGP Corporation. I need you so much that I keep paying double every year for your software. I can almost visualize you rushing to your customer database to search for those buyers who regularly bought both versions Mac and PC. Don’t worry, I don’t buy them on behalf of the same client. Never.

PGP Desktop and Apple OS X 10.5 Leopard

They don’t work well. Especially not for a critical application.

We’re not talking about a personal productivity software here. We’re talking about privacy, keys, encrypted disks full of vital data, encrypted files and encrypted e-mails that you may have to forget about if PGP Desktop continues to fail us.

So here are some sources for Disappointed Users of PGP Desktop

Free yourself from the shackles of PGP Corporation.

Start experimenting with Mac GNU Privacy Guard today!

Here are some pointers:

Visit the official MacGPG source to download: macgpg.sourceforge.net

Get the GPGMail (mail.app bundle) from the wonderful Sente: Direct download of GPGMail Beta

Enjoy.

Thunderbird is even simpler:
Download Mozilla: www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/
Install GPG as above
Download and install Enigmail add-on for Thunderbird: enigmail.mozdev.org
You are done.

In my case, I was able to import my old PGP keys to MacGPG by using the Keychain access tool that is part of GPG.

And ask yourself. Was it worth the trouble of dealing with PGP Corporation?

PGP corporation tells tall stories about beta software, how their app is intricately woven into the OS etc etc. The truth is public key encryption does not need to be this complicated.

I have a very simple question for them. Actually two:
- How can you manage to fail doing something that a guy like Sente was able to pull in a week or so? Oh, sure, PGPC will talk about software quality, testing and so on. Surely, we’ve learned something about quality from the PGP Corporation.
- How can you manage not to come up with a stable application for so many years?

What Each Leopard User Should Do: Switch to GPG

PGP Desktop and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard are not good friends. First off, if you are using PGP Desktop 9.6 and Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4), and if your encrypted data is critical to you, either do not upgrade to Leopard or wait for PGP to sort out the various quirks in PGP Desktop. If you, like myself, can’t wait to switch to Leopard though, there’s hope.

You can ditch PGP Desktop.

I’m assuming that you are using PGP Desktop for three purposes:

a. Whole Disk Encryption: Before upgrading to Leopard, just mount your PGP disk under Tiger and and save the contents in the clear. After you switch to Leopard, you can just create an encrypted disk image using Apple’s own disk utility. For me it makes much more sense to depend on Apple than PGP Corporation.

b. File operations. You have encrypted documents. I’ve used GPG (or GNU PGP) successfully for opening documents encrypted earlier by PGP Desktop 10.6.

c. Encrypted email: This will no longer work under Leopard in the way it used to work under Tiger. Again, a switch to GPG can be considered. I’ve installed GPG and managed to access my old PGP-encrypted e-mails. As a safety measure, I’ve also installed Thunderbird 2.0 and Enigmail as well. In the long run I hope to keep Mail.app free of bundles and will use Thunderbird to access my encrypted messages. As I use IMAP, it does not make any difference for my e-mail storage and processing needs.

When I had it: PGP Gave away my e-mail address

I paid several hundred euros to PGP over the past few years. Almost every upgrade was a problem. Both their software updates and operating system upgrades caused things not to work. Can you imagine? Under OS X 10.4, you’re using PGP 9.5 and when it updates to 9.6, you can no longer mount your PGP disks? PGP Corporation goes to great lengths to explain why they can’t be held responsible for our agonies. I tried quite hard to understand them but I can no longer sympathize with their position. I think there is a fundamental problem with this company. Funny enough, I lost my temper with PGP not because of all the hassle of updating or upgrading, but after an e-mail I received from PGPC. This bastion of secure communications sent me an e-mail notification for PGP Desktop 9.7. So? Well, my name was among 30 or so e-mails in the CC line. That was then when I decided PGP can’t be trusted for my security. If they can’t be careful enough not to distribute our e-mail addresses to unrelated audiences, how can we trust them for the security of our data?

Banned from PGP Forums!

Oh dear. I did not expect this. I opened a new discussion in PGP forums to discuss problems about PGP and the corporation. I was immediately banned from the forum. When I tried to login, a message says to contact the administrator. In typical PGP Corporation style, there is no clue how to reach the administrator.

Way to go PGP.

You’ve achieved a great deed by banning me from your community forums. Just think: Would not you have learned a lot just by letting us rant out our frustration at your ways and means?

I must say my aim has been to raise your eyebrows and force you to get your act together.

Maybe your product and your ways are indeed hopeless after all.