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Re: Integrating PGP with nmh / piping in a format file

1998-02-06 08:23:56

I would say that both aplications that John mentioned are the right way
to go about supporting PGP in mailers. Adding full PGP support into each
mailer is a serious duplication of scare resources and does not let the
developments benefit users of any other mailers. Transparent handling
of PGP as a kind of wrapper around sendmail (or equivalent) is the best
solution to date. See the sites mentioned for an explanation why.

Similarly, I would argue that support for the various versions of POP
should be removed from nmh and that the mailer should just call and
external program such as fetchmail which has been specifically tweaked
for such a purpose. Why keep adding features that have already been
implemented in other applications when they can simply be interfaced
into MH? The ability to mix and match is one of mh/nmh's strongest
features.
Ben

John R MacMillan <john(_at_)interlog(_dot_)com> wrote:
|I would have thought MH/nmh and PGP would appeal to the same kinds
|of folks and would be working hand-in-hand by this time, without
|resorting to MH/nmh shells.  Is there an easier way to do this that
|I'm missing?

There are a couple of options.  I use a Perl script called "premail"
that can be installed as your postproc.  There's also a Python one that
looks similar that I haven't tried called Mapil.

Both these use the PGP/MIME format, rather than just raw PGP, which I
would want to see in anything I'd use.  I'm hoping that it will all be
possible with mhn once Richard is done with his overhaul; it's pretty
awkward at present which is why something like premail is handy.

Premail is available at:

      http://www.c2.net/~raph/premail/

Mapil is at:

      http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~bescoto/mapil/


--
Ben Gross  Email: bgross(_at_)uiuc(_dot_)edu  URL: 
http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/bgross


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