[Enigmail] Disable PGP/MIME option

[Robert J. Hansen]

[takes off moderator hat, hands it to Phil.  Hold onto this, will you? 
I'll be back for it in a minute.]



My opinions here are my own.  I am not speaking for Enigmail.

Normally, I do two jobs for Enigmail.  I field user questions, and I 
work to improve the quality of the user interface.  I'm qualified for 
the former because of many years spent using Enigmail; I'm qualified for 
the latter due to graduate studies in human-computer interactions and 
research into effective cryptographic user interfaces.

I did not design the PGP/MIME interface in question.  In fact, I have 
some objections to it.  However, my objections are so small compared to 
other areas of Enigmail that I haven't even bothered opening an RFE on 
them yet--principally because I haven't done empirical usability 
analysis with test subjects yet.

Yes: _empirical usability analysis with test subjects_.  To the best of 
my knowledge, no one else in the crypto UI business does HCI usability 
testing.  Enigmail does.

This is how we roll.

> How do you deal with execs who will never understand the technical 
> subtleties?

Microsoft Word has something like 150+ widgets available to the user 
when the program first starts.  Very few people know how more than about 
ten percent of them work.  Yet, there are tons of Word users who have 
figured out "don't click on the wacky stuff you don't understand".

And you want me to believe that the presence of _one_ widget is going to 
present an insurmountable human-computer interaction problem?

I'm not saying the presence of one widget cannot cause problems.  It 
clearly can.  However, claiming that one widget is an insurmountable HCI 
problem is, at the very least, an extreme claim... and I don't take 
extreme claims seriously if they don't provide even a shred of evidence.

It appears very clear to me that you don't understand the problem.  As 
such, I'm going to ignore your proposed answer, along with the sarcasm 
and rhetoric.  Bring back facts next time and we'll talk.

> In my opinion it is VERY short sighted of the Enigmail developers to not 
>   give an option to totally disable PGP/MIME sending.

In my opinion you're a jerk who wants other people to adopt his judgment 
in lieu of their own, and to make changes to a codebase impacting tens 
of thousands of users just because you can't be bothered to sit down 
with your bosses and say "just don't click this, okay?"

This change is not going to make it into Enigmail.  Not in the near 
future, at least.  Download the source and make your own changes, then 
deploy that on desktops, if that's what you want.

And grow up.



[... walks back over to Phil, picks up the moderator hat again.  Thanks 
for holding this for me.]


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