Feature request: Allow a user to add an OpenPGP compatible public key to their profile to receive encrypted emails

[fabacab]

When I receive a notification from Crabgrass sent via email, that email leaks some information about my activities on Crabgrass. I use GnuPG wherever I can to encrypt my email for privacy reasons, and this is a suggested best practice by RiseUp's own security guide. However, as far as I know, Crabgrass offers me no way to indicate to it that I would like any emails it sends to me to be encrypted in this way.

Implementing this feature would make me feel better about using the email notifications feature, particularly about using it to notify other collaborators without worrying that the notification will leak info about our organizing activities to the insecure world of email.

Thanks.

Also, for what it's worth, I'd be happy to work on this myself (I just recently wrote WP PGP Encrypted Emails, which is a plugin for WordPress blogs that implements this feature) but I am not a skilled Ruby (on Rails) programmer and might need some general pointers.

[azul]

Hey @meitar,

Thanks for the request. I've been thinking about this myself recently. It would be great if we could work on this together. I'm currently working on the rails4 upgrade though. So it will take some time (February) before i can really focus on this.

If you are curious about rails i'm happy to show you around. But it's quite a complex beast. From what i remember rails relies on https://github.com/mikel/mail. I think there's a gpg extension for it. But I have not checked. So that might be a starting point.

Another option would be for you to help specify the requirements and give feedback, etc.
What would be the minimal thing that would be useful for you? We can start with that and then expand from there.

[fabacab]

Hi @azul,

Great to hear that we are thinking along the same lines. :)

I have worked with Rails before but that was a very long time ago (Rails 2) and so while I'm confident I can figure stuff out, it will also take me some time to get back up to speed to Rails 4. Plus, I need to brush up on my Ruby. I also can't devote all of my time to Crabgrass because there are too many other projects I am working on (notably the Buoy project, which might actually be something RiseUp is interested in, too, see my repo at https://github.com/fabacab/better-angels#readme for details) but I am an active user of we.riseup.net and am very excited about seeing Crabgrass keep getting better.

So with all that said, maybe I can start by writing up a minimum spec for this feature like you suggest and then as I get (or make) more time to work on Crabgrass with you and I re-familiarize myself with Rails, you can guide me towards making commits to support your work.

To that end, where would you like me to draft a spec for this feature? Should I just write it up on a comment on this thread? Do you prefer to use the labs.riseup.net Redmine instance? Can you point me at a prior spec that wss written for a Crabgrass feature so that I can see a bit more about how you like to work?

Thanks again for your willingness to work with me to make this happen. :)