[messaging] evolving Autocrypt effort: e-mail encryption for everyone

[holger krekel]

Since last Sunday there is a new e-mail encryption effort called
Autocrypt. It is an evolving project, with the general aim to replace
cleartext mail with encrypted mail. The effort focuses on opportunistic
approaches, convenience, incremental deployability, interoperability,
and well-thought-out (and minimal) user experience. 

The project was born during the Automatic Mail Encryption meetup last
week in Berlin.  Around 20 people (MUA developers, researchers and
encryption enthusiasts) worked for 5 days in several sessions, hacking
activities and plenaries and happily agreed to continue the effort. Here
is a list of features which distinguish it from previous efforts:

    https://autocrypt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/features.html

You'll see that early 2017 we'd like to settle on what we call "Level 0"
support, i.e. support for mail encryption on a single app.  There is
active development in Enigmail, K-9 Mail, Mailpile, Bitmask and a
reference bot implementation to get to a first fully Level 0 compliant
implementation.

Autocrypt "Level 1" will include, among other things, multi-device
support; we made good progress on that during the meeting, but decided
incremental adoption will be easier if we start simpler.  And you don't
even want to know what crazy things people have proposed for "Level 2" :P

The overall index of docs (some very drafty still) can be found here:

    https://autocrypt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

If you'd like to help, have questions or comments you
don't need to tweet about it but rather join us here:

    https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/autocrypt
    #autocrypt on freenode or #autocrypt:matrix.org[1]

As to meetings and further sessions, likely something will
happen at: 33c3, RWC, IFF and lastly we plan for another
fun multi-day meetup April/May 2017.

so much, enjoy the rest of the year!
holger, dkg and Vincent 


[1]: https://riot.im/app/#/room/#autocrypt:matrix.org