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Thanks Pol, lots of great stuff there, many of your items are already on our TODO list (which currently has at least 81 items on it).  In due time we plan on getting through all of them.

To address some of the requests you brought up:

• Add an option not to display anything as the folder content when it is disabled (or a custom message) -> This is another weak point telling people there is "secret stuff" here

I'm not sure whether this is worth the developmental effort, the idea behind encryption is that you can plainly flaunt it and it doesn't matter.

• If disabled, the folder should be made read-only using ACLs (deny all)

This would seem to imply that users would therefore be forced to use some new mechanism in Espionage to move or rename folders.  Not sure why this is necessary...

• The FAQ should contain an entry for iSpy and indicate exactly what the Kernel Extension and Daemon do

Doesn't it already?

• In the "Folder Locked" dialog, it shows the name of the app that wants to access the folder, and not its path.

There's a hidden method of getting this information: hover the mouse over the text that says "The application '__' wants access to the folder:", the full path will appear as a tooltip if it's available.

• When associating an application to a locked folder, the dialog doesn't let you go inside bundles which is necessary to add helper apps typically inside other bundles

This is a standard cocoa open panel, and as such if you need to go inside app-bundles (or access other parts of the system not visible from it), use Command+Shift+G.  You can also right-click on the application bundle in the Finder, locate the helper, and drag it onto the list.

• It would be very nice and useful to have a status item in the menubar (on the right side) that currently indicates which folders are unlocked, so that you can relock them if needed.

This is coming soon. ;-)

• Add a setting to automatically re-lock the folder when the machine goes to sleep or when the user fast-user-switch

• Add an option to automatically relock folders after some time

An auto-lock is planned for a future update, however, in most circumstances when we get this request, users don't realize that it's not necessary because they already have the tools to protect their folder.  Simply by enabling the checkbox in the Security System Preferences to "Require password to wake this computer from sleep or screen saver" is sufficient for protecting your encrypted folders. With that enabled your folders are protected, even if your computer is stolen while it's asleep.

Regarding the fast-user switch, it's not necessary to auto-lock the folder because their contents cannot be accessed by any user account, other than the one that owns the folder. To deliberately enable other users access to folders, we've implemented a "Public mountpoint" option which is turned off by default.

• You should really be able to group multiple folders together: it's just annoying to enter multiple times the unlock password for apps associated with multiple folders e.g. Safari.

You don't need to enter your password multiple times if all of the folders are using the same password.  If they are then that password will be re-used to open the rest of the folders associated with that application.

Thanks again for your feature requests! Rest assured we will be knocking most of these out, but please be patient with us, we've got other projects in the pipeline as well (exciting stuff!).

No problem! :-)

While there's currently no way to specify that a folder only be opened by a specific application, Espionage has an ignore list that should be used to solve these sorts of problems.  I would recommend adding QuickSilver to the blacklist, you can do this from within Espionage or directly from the password prompt by clicking on the button in the lower-left:



As for Path Finder, there are several things to check:

1) Check its View Options (Command+J) and make sure that "Calculate All Sizes" is turned off for all of the parent folders of the folder in question.
2) If you're using List View, then make sure that the disclosure triangle for that folder is set to the "closed" position.

If that doesn't help, see if you can find a pattern to what sorts of scenarios cause it to appear.  However, please keep in mind that for now we do not officially support Path Finder, as we've so far been focusing our development efforts on ensuring complete Finder integration. The good news though is that we do plan on improving Path Finder support in future versions, so your feedback is greatly appreciated!

Also, are you sure you haven't moved either of those applications since adding them as application associations? You may want to try removing them, and then re-adding them as application associations (click the Edit Application Associations button for each folder).

Hi Rick,

What applications did you protect? If you'd rather not answer on a public forum please contact our support email address. Also, which password prompt are you getting? Espionage will show two password prompts, one if an application is trying to access a folder (folder prompt), and a different one if it detects that you're trying to run an application that's setup as part of the application associations (application prompt).

The application prompt will show the application's icon along with a small folder badge, and will contain the text "<App> is trying to access its encrypted data in the folder:"

Great! :-)

[locked]

Say you have Espionage installed on two computers on the same internal network, and you'd like to have an encrypted folder that's shared between these two computers. With normal folders you might use a program such as ChronoSync (with Apple File Sharing) to accomplish this task, but with Espionage, you can still use ChronoSync! There's just some things that you need to keep in mind:

• On both machines, have ChronoSync added to Espionage's whitelist.
• Only sync the folders when both the destination and the source folders are locked.
• On the machine you're syncing to, before syncing, disable all of the encrypted folders that are about to be synced. This is only required if you're syncing across the network using Apple file sharing. If you're syncing to a folder that's on an attached USB or Firewire drive, the folder is already "disabled".
• Never do a bi-directional sync on an encrypted folder, sync one way or the other only. You can switch directions at future syncs.

That's about it. To summarize the important points: make sure that ChronoSync (or your favorite synchronization app) is whitelisted, and that you only actually perform the sync operation when all folders that will be synced are locked (or disabled).

Hi nomolo, it may still be that Logitech's installed its "Scroll Enhancer", check the logitech post to see if those files exist on your computer.  Otherwise, don't worry, we're currently working on an awesome little diagnostic app that will be finished very soon (hopefully today) that you can use to send us a bunch of diagnostic information that should help us quickly fix this problem. I will reply to this thread again once that's finished.

Sure thing, and another way you'll know is if Espionage suddenly gets an Entourage app template (keep an eye on the release notes).

Hey Jo!

Although we wanted to, we did not include an application template for Entourage because of a bug in it associated with how it stores its emails for Spotlight.

Essentially, while there's no problem at all encrypting the Entourage database located here:

Code Select Expand

~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2008 Identities/your identity
There is a problem with its Spotlight data which it stores here:

Code Select Expand

~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Microsoft/Entourage
That folder contains Spotlight-readable versions of all of your Entourage email so that you can search for it in Spotlight.  If you don't care about that ability then you can go right ahead and encrypt your entourage database and disable its Spotlight support in the preferences.

If you try to encrypt Entourage's metadata folder, Entourage will ignore it and will not update it as new emails arrive. We *have* contacted Microsoft's Mac Business unit about this problem a while ago, and they replied to us saying that they would look into the issue, but so far I don't think they've done anything about it. Please feel free to contact them though and let the know they should fix it!

To answer your other question, yes, it would be backed up encrypted. Though again, we encourage you to also make use of Espionage's built-in backups because they make restoring a folder easy.

We've quickly thrown together a simple tool called TEDiagnosticTool that gathers many of the files that we would normally ask you to find yourself.  Unfortunately we did not have time to make it very nice and automated (we will improve it at some point though).  For now, just run it, go through the steps, leave the checkboxes selected. It will then quit and open a Finder window with a folder named "TEDT-XXXXXX" (where the X's are numbers) selected.  Right-click on this folder, compress it into a zip file, and email it to our support address.  This should give us the information needed to figure out why Espionage is misbehaving on your system.

Edit: The tool has been updated, it's very much automated now. It should gather the information, zip it up, and send it to us without much intervention on your part (if all goes well).

I'm sorry to hear about the continuing problems. We wouldn't be too thrilled either if Espionage caused such behavior, but thankfully this seems like a special case. We're going to write a simple diagnostic application that will gather various log files and other information (such as settings, file paths, etc) that will help us understand what's going on.

In the meantime, was Espionage ever successfully working for you? Based on that log it looks like you may have already encrypted some folders. Are you encrypting any folders over a network, or perhaps ones in Dropbox?

We have not tested Espionage with Amazon's S3 backup service, but any backup service that is based around folders accessible from the Finder will work.

For example, if you use Dropbox, you can set your backup destination to the Dropbox folder and everything will upload efficiently, taking full advantage of the bands in sparsebundles.  We have also tested similar services like SugarSync and Mozy.  The same concept applies, just set your backup destination to a folder that these services backup.  For more information, see the help topic "Backing up protected folders" in Espionage's built-in help documentation.

[same password and encryption settings]

That's odd, can you unlock a folder by unchecking the "Locked" checkbox in Espionage?  I suspect that if this is the case then you shouldn't be able to do that.

Since we haven't received any reports of this before I don't think this is a widespread bug (and we're unable to reproduce it here), but it would help us see what's going wrong if you could send the relevant information from the system log that's output when you attempt to switch to the login keychain. The system log is accessible from the Espionage Help menu, and a video that shows how to use it is available here. Please send the log to our support email address (don't post it to this forum).

You can get around the problem by doing this:

• Disable all of the folders that you have in Espionage by unchecking the Enabled checkbox (and don't forget to press "Save Changes")
• After all folders are disabled, move all of them to some temporary location that's different from their current location.
• In Espionage, remove all of the folders from Espionage by pressing the minus button (or pressing the backspace key).
• Espionage will attempt to restore the folders, but since they have been moved it will just complain about not being able to find them
• Switch to using the login keychain. Now there are no passwords to migrate so it should work.
• Move all of the folders back to their original locations.
• Re-add each folder to Espionage using the same password and encryption settings that you used for the folder previously. Espionage will quickly re-add them without re-encrypting them.

Sorry about this problem, the keychain can be odd sometimes and we're actually planning on moving away from it.

- Greg

Have you tried logging out and logging back in and trying it again?