IncreaseWKDUsage2021 bachelor thesis

At Intevation a bachelor thesis will be written by Christoph Klassen starting 2021-10 to see how usage of WKD can be furthered. Bernhard Reiter does the mentoring, see gnupg-devel@ for discussion and for contacting Christoph or Bernhard.

Goal

WKD is easy to implement and brings the advantage of good usability. Because of that it is desirable to spread it and increase its usage. The question is how to do that and which is the best way. More concrete: Which measures fit best to spread the WKD standard. This measures are taken from the area of software engineering and include documentation, testing and implementation. They will be applied to different products that are Free Software.

Difficulty

It is necessary to evaluate the success of different measures to tell which one was the most effective one. It is not possible to track users while using their products, because one main promise of the products is to protect users privacy. So there have to be other ways to measure the success. One idea is to log the WKD calls on a server, which has much traffic. Please contact Bernhard or Christoph when you have these possibilities or know someone who could do this service. It would be very helpful!
This idea would help to evaluate the success of all measures overall. Additionally, it would be of great value, if there would be a way to differentiate between the measures. Maybe the statistics could show a correlation between measures and increase of WKD calls.

Criterions to evaluate the state of products

To evaluate how far WKD is integrated and how easy it is to use WKD in different products, the questions in the list below will be answered. If the answer is positive a product gets the amount of points that is shown in brackets. The maximal possible amount of points is 14.

• Are the maintainers familiar with WKD?/ Did the maintainers hear about WKD? (1)
• Are the maintainers convinced of WKD? (1)
• Is WKD implemented already (2)
  • If not: Is it planned to implement WKD? (1)
• Is it documented that WKD is used in the product? (1)
• Is WKD enabled by default? (5)
  • If not:
    • Is it documented how to enable WKD? (1)
    • How easy is it to enable WKD? (max. 3)
• Is WKD used automatically? (2)
• Is WKD used when composing emails? (1)
• Is WKD used when reading emails? (1)

State of products and progress

Here it will be described if products use WKD, if it's in discussion to use WKD or not and how far the WKD standard is implemented.

Mailvelope

Previous state

• Does use WKD
• The implementation is not up-to-date since it doesn't contain the advanced method
• There is an issue for the advanced method on Github: https://github.com/mailvelope/mailvelope/issues/774

Measures

• As part of this work a branch was created to implement the advanced method: https://github.com/c8k/mailvelope

Claws Mail

Previous state

• Integrated WKD since version 3.18.0 / 4.0.0: https://www.claws-mail.org/news.php
• How to get a key via WKD:
  • At the right side of an opened email is a toolbar with a button that contains a key icon (see Screenshot attachment:wkd_claws_mail.png
  • A click on it opens a window where the key of the belonging email address can be fetched (via key server or WKD)

Measures

• Request (https://lists.claws-mail.org/pipermail/users/2021-November/028871.html): In the compose window users can right-click on an email address to open a context menu, where they can e.g. add this address to their address book. To give users the possibility to retrieve keys of email addresses, from which they didn't receive an email yet, it was requested to implement another action to do just that. Optionally, this action could be shown only, if the user enabled a privacy system.
• Request (https://lists.claws-mail.org/pipermail/users/2021-November/028870.html): Automatically enable a privacy system as soon as an user adds one, when loading a plugin.

Fairmail/ K9Mail

Previous state

• Use OpenKeyChain to retrieve keys via WKD and encrypt emails
• It is necessary to open OpenKeyChain to retrieve keys. This step is not possible in the GUI of the products

FairMail

Measures

• Requested an easier way to open the OpenKeyChain app, so users can open it from FairMail and don't have to go to the settings of the phone to start the OpenKeyChain app there: https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/app-5-0-fairemail-fully-featured-open-source-privacy-oriented-email-app.3824168/post-85942453

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Scope: additional notes, hints or other infos about WKD, which do not fit the other pages.