How to decrypt all text prior to Exporting?

[David33409 17]

Mac 10.9.5 Evernote 6

 

I have thousands of notes many of which contain encrypted text. I use the same password for all my encrypted text. Is there a way to temporarily decrypt all of the text BEFORE exporting to HTML? 

 

Thank you for your time and consideration.

 

[gazumped 11,652]

Hi.  AFAIK encryption/ decryption only works on a note-by-note basis.  You might be able to search for encrypted notes and use a script of some sort to decrypt and export them - type "encryption:"  - without the quotes but with the colon - in the search box to get a list.  If you forget the search term - In the Left Panel choose:  >Attributes >Contains >Encrypted Text.

[David33409 17]

Hi.  AFAIK encryption/ decryption only works on a note-by-note basis.  You might be able to search for encrypted notes and use a script of some sort to decrypt and export them - type "encryption:"  - without the quotes but with the colon - in the search box to get a list.  If you forget the search term - In the Left Panel choose:  >Attributes >Contains >Encrypted Text.

Hi gaz, I used the "encrypted:" search and I'll see if I can get it to work in AppleScript. Is the Attributes feature available in the Mac version?

[Adjusting 276]

 

Hi.  AFAIK encryption/ decryption only works on a note-by-note basis.  You might be able to search for encrypted notes and use a script of some sort to decrypt and export them - type "encryption:"  - without the quotes but with the colon - in the search box to get a list.  If you forget the search term - In the Left Panel choose:  >Attributes >Contains >Encrypted Text.

Hi gaz, I used the "encrypted:" search and I'll see if I can get it to work in AppleScript. Is the Attributes feature available in the Mac version?

 

 

In the Mac client:

1. Click on the Search field

2. Click on the Add Search Option pulldown menu

3. Select Contains

4. In the second pulldown select Encryption

5. Click the Add button

 

Alternatively if your system language is set to English:

1. Click on the search field

2. Type 'encrypt'

Descriptive Search will suggest “Are you searching for Notes with encryption"

3. Click on the suggestion

[David33409 17]

Thank you Adjusting. That helps. I didn't realize that feature was there.

[andreasstokke 0]

Hey, did anyone find a way of exporting encrypted notes as not encrypted? Would be super useful. I use the export feature to make backups of my notes. 

[Rashchik 0]

I have the same request - I'd like to be able to export encrypted messages / notes as non encrypted.

[aviaryan 4]

+1 to this request. Or is there some insight on what kind of encryption Evernote uses.

Maybe we can write a script to decrypt it from HTML.

Update - HTML Export of encrypted note contains nothing. Now that sucks.

 

[gazumped 11,652]

56 minutes ago, aviaryan said:

+1 to this request. Or is there some insight on what kind of encryption Evernote uses.

Maybe we can write a script to decrypt it from HTML.

Update - HTML Export of encrypted note contains nothing. Now that sucks.

If it was that easy there'd be no point to encryption.  Also downloading notes so they're decrypted seems like an excellent tool to have if you want to browse someone else's account at your leisure. 

Encrypted PDFs could be exported with their notes,  so all you need to do is find all encrypted notes and convert them...

 

[aviaryan 4]

14 minutes ago, gazumped said:

If it was that easy there'd be no point to encryption.

I mean the export should only start once user has correctly entered their encryption password. I don't see how that is insecure in any way.

 

Anyways, I found a script with decrypts encrypted enex files.

Here is it if anyone else wants decrypted ENEX files. https://github.com/aviaryan/Evernote-Decrypt

[gazumped 11,652]

Sorry - I thought you were aiming to export a notebook and decrypt any protected content.  The script is a nice find,  but I tend to use different passwords on individual notes,  and usually save a hint in the note.  Plus I use PDFs because they can include images and other content that Evernote encryption doesn't (didn't) include.

[Jake42 0]

On 2/17/2021 at 3:16 AM, aviaryan said:

script that decrypts encrypted enex files.

Here is it if anyone else wants decrypted ENEX files. https://github.com/aviaryan/Evernote-Decrypt

Just a note that this script does not decrypt the older "RC2" encryption, only the latter "AES" encryption, at least, I couldn't get it to work at all. I even added debug to the python code to confirm.

The only thing that worked for me was search for all notes with encryption, add them to a new notebook, then go through each and decrypt permanently, then export that notebook, then re-import into the destination and deal with duplicates there.

So glad I found out now that the export silently ignores all encrypted text as I had cancelled my subscription several weeks ago. 

I get that it shouldn't just blindly decrypt, but I would have appreciated a warning that it was explicitly NOT going to do anything, and that that information would have been lost.

[PinkElephant 8,072]

Well, it is a GitHub find, and this place is full of pleasant little tools, but they are not build to be professional software.

In this case everything was dropped in there 11 month ago and not revised since. Probably the dev had the same situation as you, wrote that little script, used it himself, and placed it into GitHub as a good place to store such code.

So use the exporter at your discretion, but you need to make sure (as you did) that the results are satisfactory before proceeding. Usually the dev will be happy about a friendly contact, and may even add a little messaging to his program.

[Jake42 0]

To clarify, my gripe is with Evernote not warning that the export process found and skipped over encrypted contents in notes. I only discovered that by accident much later. The potential for data loss was my gripe. 
 

the gist was helpful and I’m glad the person contributed it to the world! If I had more need I probably would have attempted to modify it for my needs. Thankfully I didn’t have that many notes with encrypted content to deal with. 

[PinkElephant 8,072]

My understanding: You run a script to automatically perform a process EN expects you to do manually.

If anybody needs to drop a message, it is this script you use to avoid the manual processing. I do not see EN in any responsibility to secure an unofficial, unsupported export process.

[Shewey 0]

I found the same issue with notes not being decrypted on export.

I got the solution here to work https://github.com/aviaryan/Evernote-Decrypt, though as Python 2.7 is deprecated and required for the script to work, that needed to be installed manually from here https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-2718/

The encrypted notes were copied to a new notebook in EN, then exported as *.enex.
Ran the command line to decrypt.
Imported *.enex into Joplin.
Data was all intact.

 

Edited February 28 by Shewey
Added URL to Python 2.7