Gpg4win 3 Release Candidate
As a major step for Gpg4win, a long development cycle will lead to a new stable release 3.0 within the next weeks.
You can help us by giving one of our pre-release versions a run to find any remaining problems that may occur with your special setting or use case.
If you test a release candidate, please send your test feedback to the gpg4win developer mailing list (gpg4win-devel@wald.intevation.org) or report an issue via https://dev.gnupg.org/.
The roadmap expects a final version of Gpg4win at the end of August or early September, depending on the defects this public test finds. Thank you very much for your help and support!
You can download the latest Release Candidate at https://wiki.gnupg.org/Gpg4win/Testversions
The most important changes in an overview:
Support of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)
With the integration of the upcoming GnuPG 2.2 release candidate.
There are a lot more general improvements coming with GnuPG 2.2, for a long technical list, see https://www.gnupg.org/faq/whats-new-in-2.1.html
Preparing for better overall crypto user experience
Fetching pubkeys by default. Most users want some basic level of confidentiality for their email and file exchanges without having to deal with crypto details like distributing and checking pubkeys and their signatures. An update to Gpg4win 3.0 will provide an implementation of a concept called `web key directory/service`. Version 3.0 already contains some changes preparing for the concept: It will by default try to fetch missing pubkeys and find them for a given email address. This behavior can be switched off, of course. For details see
- https://wiki.gnupg.org/WKD
- `--auto-key-retrieve` and `--auto-key-locate` in the GnuPG documentation.
Major Outlook-Support improvement for attachments and encodings
The included Outlook Plugin (GpgOL) has been completely overhauled.
- Complete support for OpenPGP/MIME in MS Outlook 2007/2010/2013/2016 (32 and 64bit). This allows to send and receive text in other languages and attachments in a proper way.
- New user interface to display the state of encryption directly in the mail window.
- Support for sending and receiving HTML Emails.
Kleopatra (Crypto-Manager)
- The file-encryption dialogues have been redesigned to reduce the clicks and enhance the user experience.
- Kleopatra recognizes automatically the kind of a crypto-file and executes the according action on a double-click (e.g. decrypting an encrypted file).
- New smart-card management view.
- New first start dialogue (when key management is empty).
- Detail-view on key-details has been improved.
- Support for automatic import of missing pubkeys has been implemented (WKD).
- Many UI- and stability improvements and additional translations.
And more
- Added and enabled by default: a check over the internet for available updates, which will notify the user.
- A more straight forward installation process.
- Installation as normal user (without administration priviledges) now possible.
- Gpg4win compendium (German version) has been completely overhauled. We are looking for people to help us translating the changes back into English and other languages. However this probably cannot not achieved for Gpg4win 3.0 as we want to improve some necessary infrastructure for translations first, to make your life much easier.
- Included software libraries have been updated.
Components
May be upgraded between the release candidates.