[X4U] Backing up Apple Mail in Leopard

[David Ledger]

>From: Ed Gould <edgould1948 at comcast.net>
>On Sep 28, 2008, at 3:57 AM, David Ledger wrote:
>
>>>  From: Ed Gould <edgould1948 at comcast.net>
>>>  Do you know of anyone that is offering PGP for mail.app ? I tried
>>>  Google and the only thing that came up was some hack and it was out
>>>  of europe (IIRC).
>>
>>  What do you mean by being a 'hack'?
>
>I mean that it is the author states it will only work with version
>x.x and it may have issues with newer versions.

If you mean 'only work with version x.x' of the mailer, then either 
it will or won't work with your emailer - the PGP side should be 
pretty universal.

If you mean 'version x.x' of PGP then it's a limited version and 
you'd be right to avoid it (unless it's only the very old versions 
it's not compatible with).

>Sometimes you can say
>who cares but with PGP the data is encrypted and if can't be
>unencrypted because of a version change you are pretty well sunk. ALL
>mail that is encrypted is essentially lost. That is what I am
>concerned about.

You'd normally only use PGP for the transmission of email, not the 
storage on your computer - you might use an encrypted disc image for 
that. So the mail isn't lost if there's a PGP compatibility issue, 
just not readable by the recipient.

>By buying that product you can only hope that the
>author will forever support the product. There are no guarantees in
>computer world and this is a BIG issue. I cannot afford to loose any
>email.

The open version - GPG - won't have this issue because there will 
always be enthusiasts. The downside is that it's not (AFAIK) 
interfaced to Mail and you have to do things to use it.

David


-- 
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
HP-UX specialist of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk)
david.ledger at ivdcs.co.uk
www.ivdcs.co.uk