Improvements
- Integration tests can be built by:
- setting up a directory with a single key,
- calling Lacre from command-line, feeding its standard-input with a message,
- verifying that the result is properly encoded and is still a valid email.
- Installation of gpg-mailgate used to be a manual, error-prone process. We can change it into at least semi-automatic process supported by helper scripts.
Future
Migrate to 'Advanced Content Filter'
We could migrate from a simple content filters to advanced content filters in the future. This would improve performance.
Store identities in a database
Identities could be stored in Berkeley DB or another file-based database (gdbm, ndbm). Berkeley DB is quite advanced though and often used by mail infrastructure (e.g. aliases databases), so this would make Lacre more natural for mail administrators. Also, a MySQL or MariaDB dependency is quite heavy. (We could use Btree or Hash for identities and Queue for a queue of identities submitted via web interface or over incoming email addressed to register@ virtual account).
Integrate with Sequoia
November 23rd, there's been NGI webinar on future of OpenPGP. During that webinar we'd learned that Lars Wirzenius was working on Sequoia command-line interface and was looking for stakeholders to be involved in future work on this project.
Since we're considering replacing our custom Python module with some other solution, Sequoia seems like a good candidate.
In January 2022 we'd contacted him to get involved.