Cannot edit encrypted notes in Mac version 10.3 and 10.4

[rwestcott1 0]

I enter the passcode to decrypt the note but then cannot edit or add to the Note.  First occured after update to 10.3 last week.  Just updated to 10.4 today but still no change.  Any suggestions or workarounds?

[dkuckuk 4]

Add my voice about this ill-conceived change: 

Not being able to edit encrypted text without decrypting is close to, if not, a dealbreaker after using EN for a decade.

Even worse as when re-encrypting after decrypting-to-edit much formatting is lost.  

This, inability to email note contents directly...EN must stop 'fixing' things that aren't broken.  This stinks.

 

 

[vincesan 1]

This is my first time posting, and I do so with thoughtful reservation.  This is my first time to post a complaint on a site of this kind.  I was a very early user of Evernote and found great value in the product.  The UX was very well designed and over time I agreed to pay.  Then a series of changes were introduced that indicated they lost sight of the original design principles.  They also charged me double for a year and refused to reimburse me.  Although the design is inferior, I am going to switch to Onenote as it is free and integrated into Microsoft's suite which has dramatically improved.  The way they changed editing of encrypted text is the last straw for me.  Product management is fatally flawed.  I don't see how the company is going to survive.

[nspirov 1]

Just my 10 cents on this:

I was compiling a (quite big) list of features that the new client took away. Nevermind, I don't need this list. Not being able to edit the many encrypted texts containing sensitive information makes EN unusable for work, at least for me. I use this on everyday basis.

I guess from the millions of users there are thousands who can say the same thing for each other feature removed. That's not how it should be done. BTW my job is sales manager in a software company. I know that's how you lose customers to the competitors.

So I am sticking to the legacy version and if it becomes unusable, I will weigh my options again. 

Sorry for the long 10 cents.

[seltzerbing 0]

I second this.  I have used Evernote for almost 10 years and love it.  But...not being able to edit encrypted text the way it used to work is a real downer.  I'm considering using something else.  I'm a paid user. 

Why remove something that was so convenient? 

Also, not sure if this is just me, but with the latest update Evernote no longer shows on  my Windows taskbar.  I have to use alt-tab to find it after it's opened.

 

[mdonaldo 0]

Why on Earth won't you let me edit my encrypted text conveniently? The loss of tabs, my shortcuts, now this. I really just want to go back to the version of Evernote I've been loving for years. 

[noellelaff 0]

Why wouldn't I want to edit my encrypted note.  I wish I could go back.  

 

[evans036 0]

and if that note is sent to the cloud whilst unencrypted (ie before i have re-encrypted), is that not a security issue?

[Mykola D 0]

I updated my Mac app to Version 10 just now, and I am appalled. I'm editing encrypted notes daily. Some of my encrypted texts are huge, and they have formatting inside of them.  Requiring me to decrypt the entire note every time I want to add something to it is:

1. a huge security risk - my note will be stored unencrypted for some time while I'm editing it, and I might forget to encrypt it back, or I lose connection or the app crashes or something similar,
2. an additional unnecessary number of actions, that provide zero value, worsen my user experience for no reason.

Also, I used to search inside the encrypted text. Routinely! Both on Mac app and on Android app. The feature is gone on both! Search is now blind to the contents of the currently decrypted/displayed text. Is that what you call an improvement and "by design"?

Both features are gone. "By design!?" Seriously? You've been "evaluating this change" since November 2020? How is this evaluation going so far?

I've been a paying customer for a number of years and I've brought so many friends and colleagues to the app. Now I'm installing OneNote on all of my devices. This must be fixed immediately if you want to keep me and people like me as a customer.

Thank you for your attention.

[Eduardo Estefano 89]

This new workflow to decrypt, change and then encrypt really sucks. That's all I have to say...Terrible design. Hopefully we get back this awsome feature. 

[frankesantos 1]

To Evernote staff: It's been nine months since the original poster posted their message about how annoying it is to not be able to edit encrypted text. Obviously a fair number of us use this feature, so please, I implore you to bring it back. 

 

[Nick L. 681]

This is currently by design. In Evernote 10 you must decrypt the text to edit it, and then encrypt it again. We're evaluating this change at this time to match the legacy app. 

[Gary M Verde 0]

Wow.  I've never seen working features removed from a product quite like this.  I've been using Evernote for only about 6 years, but this "upgrade" marks the end of that!

[Eduardo Estefano 89]

Em 04/06/2021 at 17:57, Gary M Verde disse:

Wow.  I've never seen working features removed from a product quite like this.  I've been using Evernote for only about 6 years, but this "upgrade" marks the end of that!

Yeah, this was a really nice feature. Easy to use. Now it is not so easy anymore. To see the text they added an extra click. There is no more Edit feature. So you need to unencrypt, cut the text from the note very fast so that it is not saved unencrypted, paste it somewhere, make the changes, then paste and encrypt very fast again, to avoid saving the content unencrypted. 
 

most likely it will get saved unencrypted  in the note history. 

[steveryan 1]

Enable the editing of encrypted text or this will be my last year using Evernote. Evernote 10 is buggy and nowhere near as useful to me as the it was 10 years ago.  

Tables are better: good.

Tasks are much better: great!

Encrypted text editing problems suck and are a deal breaker for me. 

 

[PinkElephant 8,117]

Decrypt and edit. Encrypt and don’t edit. Edit while encrypted is a contradiction - maybe you can explain what it really means.

Or better use an attachment that can be encrypted, this is probably easier to handle.

[Eduardo Estefano 89]

In the old version, EN would create an encrypted container. You would click on it and EN would show the contents and allow you to edit it. And then that was it. There was no need to do anything. You could copy text from other places and paste it into the encryption box. At one time, before the new tables, you could even encrypt the tables. 
 

If you opened the note on a browser, you would never see the contents unencrypted. You would be editing the content inside the encryption box and even if the note synced, the contents would show as encrypted in the web. Besides being much easier to work with encryption, there was no chance of synchronization of the content unencrypted as there is now. 

[PinkElephant 8,117]

If you didn’t need to decrypt it, it was in fact only protected by the general EN security measures. 

IMHO that is as good / bad as the general encryption applied to the complete EN database.

[frankesantos 1]

I want to echo what everyone's said above. I really enjoy using Evernote but taking away the ability to edit encrypted text has really stopped me in my tracks. I recently updated to version 10.16.7 for Mac and man is this annoying me. 

[Summerpenguin 0]

I just upgraded and just tried to add something to my encrypted note and found I couldn't edit it without decrypting the whole thing. I saw that one or more Evernote staff have chimed in - one back in November. I saw another elephant seemingly arguing with users why they want such a feature. The lack of status updates and care of features that users want, surely will drive Users to other products (by the busload).

It is common knowledge that decrypting anything pops it into memory that makes it less secure. Please do not argue with Users who want what used to be a reason to use Evernote.

Please reinstate the feature that many users want: Editing within the encrypted text box without decrypting it first.

Or at least, show us a status of the plan to fix it before these Users leave for a different product.

Thank you.

[PinkElephant 8,117]

On 8/3/2021 at 11:03 PM, frankesantos said:

To Evernote staff: It's been nine months since the original poster posted their message about how annoying it is to not be able to edit encrypted text. Obviously a fair number of us use this feature, so please, I implore you to bring it back. 

EN staff is usually not in the forum, it is user2user.

To contact EN, use the feedback function build into the clients, or issue a support ticket.

[kthomason 0]

I too am a loyal, long-term paying Evernote power-user that is so dismayed that this essential ability to easily edit and search encrypted notes has been removed that I am strongly considering leaving Evernote and switching to other solutions.  I have endured so many other changes and updates over the years but this is a game changer.  Evernote really needs to better understand how power users use their software and why some of us have been around for many years.  

Please restore things to the previous functionality or perhaps provide an improvement, rather than a massive step backwards that makes your software pretty much unusable for the way that so many of us use it and depend on it.

[PinkElephant 8,117]

You can search for notes that contain any encryption, no problem. This command in the search field will return all notes with encrypted content. You can combine it with searching for specific tags, in specific notebooks, by creation or modification date etc.

contains:enCrypt

If you need it frequently, save the search term Inna saved search. You can even pin it to shortcuts.

You can’t search inside of the encrypted section - it would contradict the encryption if the content would be available in plain text in a search index.

[Mykola D 0]

@PinkElephant, you comment and suggest things without understanding what people are saying and asking. Your search query for encrypted notes is handy but I've never needed this and never used it, and it is not what I need. I used to be able to open an encrypted note and, while the text was shown to me, I was able to search inside that note, including inside that shown encrypted text. That's why this is irrelevant and I'm surprised that anyone could even imagine this would add any value to this conversation: "You can’t search inside of the encrypted section - it would contradict the encryption if the content would be available in plain text in a search index". Again, both mobile and computer versions of the application used to allow us to open the encrypted part of the note (by entering the password & decrypting for viewing), and immediately being able to search inside the encrypted section. It is about searching inside the note, not among the notes. Also both versions supported editing/updating the encrypted portions of the notes. Both editing and searching inside the encrypted part of the notes were removed, and instead someone from Evernote suggested to manually decrypt and then re-encrypt the notes when you simply need to update/edit something in the encrypted part. We just lost a feature when Evernote did that for me seamlessly and automatically with no downsides. Instead of being able to search inside the encrypted part of the note Evernote suggests what exactly? Search with your eyes, even if it's hundreds of lines of encrypted text. Great customer focus, great product and feature management.

I'm happy to report that Microsoft OneNote now has this covered and I moved my encrypted notes to OneNote. I'm looking forward to the time when I discontinue to be a paying customer of Evernote because this is a deal breaker for me, and I don't want to be treated like this.

[PinkElephant 8,117]

We completely agree that EN encryption sucks.

We just come from different perspectives to this conclusion. Your perspective is „it lacks the ease of use it had before“. Fair enough - although my main concern with an encryption is not „ease of use“ ! I don’t like the encryption method, and that has not changed from legacy to now. I have too many unanswered questions about security to even think about using it.

IMHO the only way to store encrypted content securely in EN was and still is to create an encrypted document outside of EN, encrypt it before attaching it to a note, and decrypt it only outside of EN. Personally I have decided for myself to store confidential information in my password manager, that has a section for „secure notes“. It encrypts the whole database, not only a fraction of it.

 

[Eduardo Estefano 89]

Yes!!!!!  Feature is back!

[Eduardo Estefano 89]

Now, please give the option to remember the saved password like we have in the Desktop version.