Optional per-peer state

An Autocrypt-capable MUA must store some specific state about each of its peers.

This document attempts to describe additional optional state that can improve the user experience in some corner cases.

Unlike the standard Autocrypt level 1 state management, some of these rules depend on a MUA being able to keep track of whether it has seen a given message before or not, and these guidelines may cause non-deterministic results depending on the order that messages are encountered.

Additional state

An agent MAY store additional per-peer metadata about observed Autocrypt messages. This can be used to provide more helpful information when user intervention is required.

  • counting_since: The UTC timestamp of when we started counting

  • count_have_ach: A count of parsed AutoCrypt headers

  • count_no_ach: A count of messages without AutoCrypt headers

  • bad_user_agent: The apparent user-agent (if known) of the last message seen without AutoCrypt headers.

The theory is that a message of the form “The recipient may not be able to read encrypted mail” could be augmented with reasons such as “The last 5 messages we saw from them all came from a non-AutoCrypt capable e-mail application”, or “Their most recent message was sent on April 5th using Apple Mail on an iPad.”

Managing additional state

When processing a message from the peer:

  • If counting_since is unset, set it to the current time. Otherwise, if effective_date is greater than counting_since:

    • If no Autocrypt header is available, increment count_no_ac.

    • If an Autocrypt header is available, increment count_have_ac.

When processing a message without an autocrypt header from a peer who has send an header in the past and thus has a autocrypt_timestamp:

  • set bad_user_agent to the apparent user-agent of the message

  • If counting_since is older than autocrypt_timestamp and more than 35 days older than effective_date:

    • set counting_since to last_seen

    • set count_have_ach to zero

    • set count_no_ach to one

Using additional state

During message composition, if the Autocrypt recommendation is discourage this state can be used to craft a more-informative warning message for the user.