Is it possible to disable encryption after it has been used?

[Robert Chavers]

Thanks for the awesome project! I can't believe I have been using mailpiler since 2012.

I noticed that I have "encrypt_messages=1" in piler.conf. However, I do not have any legal/organizational requirement to encrypt the messages in the store and I would like to turn encryption off going forward.

My questions are: 1) If I change the setting to "encrypt_messages=0", will I still have access to my old messages? 2) If the answer above is yes, is there a way to decrypt the old messages?

Thank you, Rob

[Janos SUTO]

Hello Robert, it's a nice thing that you've been using piler for 3 years :-)

Note that officially there's no way turn off encryption for an existing archive. However if you turned it off now, then the gui would try to instruct the pilerget utility to skip decryption. So chances are that it will work, but it's unofficial, and I don't recommend it. If I were you and I weren't short on cpu power, then I'd leave it as it is now.

Probably it would be better to add a column to metadata indicating whether the given message is encrypted or not, but this settings shouldn't change after deployment, so I'm pretty reluctant to introduce such a change.

[Robert Chavers]

No problem leaving encryption enabled, I just like the idea of keeping them unencrypted in case of emergency. I will just leave good enough alone!

Thanks again.