[Mew-dist 05740] pgp5, gpg, kong, etc.

[sen_ml at example.com]

At around Wed, 29 Jul 1998 21:12:32 +0900,
 Kazu Yamamoto (山本和彦) <kazu at example.com> may have mentioned:

> From: sen_ml at example.com
> Subject: [Mew-dist 05734] decrypting non-pgp/mime pgp5.x messages
> Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1998 19:56:54 +0900
> 
> >   i'd like to be able to decrypt pgp5 messages which are not sent as
> > pgp/mime, but i didn't find any functions to do so within mew -- i searched
> > the mailing list archives, which seemed to say that support may be added 
> > in the future.  is this correct?
> 
> PGP 5 support is planed in the future. But this means that Mew will
> provide an interface to select algorithm of both hash and
> encryption. To my best knowledge, verification and decrypting works
> well in the current beta.

are you considering adding support (or hooks) for things like gnu pg,
crypto kong, etc.?  for that matter, what about an independent emacs
crypto package?

> If you are talking MIME stuff, instead of PGP version, the answer is
> no. Actually, old Mew provided manual description/verification
> mechanism. But it works only for English. If languages other than
> English is encrypted, how to guess its character set without any
> labels? All in all, the old PGP format is not attractive in these
> days.

allowing the user to specify or letting the user keep profiles for
messages received from certain addresses (or other criteria) might offer
reasonable alternatives.  i would favor the former as the latter might
introduce complications...

> Sen, I can understand what you want. But we repeated this discussion
> many times. I don't want to discuss this issue again, sorry.

sorry to hear that.  i'll think about it more before bothering you
further :-) do you know of an easy way for me to locate those
discussions you mentioned?  i would like to read them before causing
more of a nuissance.

> >   to use this, you need to create a directory named ~/.pgp/tmp/ (mode
> > should be something like 700 i think) -- decrypted files are placed
> > here -- i don't think placing decrypted files in /tmp is a good idea,
> > what do people think?
> 
> I do. Because we can't ensure that our home directory locates on the
> local file system, I chose /tmp. If you are using NFS, your decrypted
> message may be tire-tapped.

oops.  i didn't think of that :-)  must be because i stopped using nfs :-)

i can see that letting the user configure this is a good idea.

i presume that if someone is using nfs to access their home directory,
that their pgp private key is not stored there either...

> > p.s. using mew and pgp5 w/ debian required that i put:
> > 
> > (setq mew-prog-pgp "pgp5")
> > 
> > in my .emacs file -- i believe this is because the pgp binary gets
> > installed as pgp5...is there some way to deal w/ this nicely within
> > mew? 
> 
> If your PGP 5 is installed as "pgp5", that is the only way. I think
> that PGP 5 should be installed as "pgp5" by default like "perl5" so
> that we can distinguish it with PGP 2, however, it's too late.

ok, thanks for the confirming note.

> > p.p.s. are there any plans for supporting mailing list commands w/in
> > mew?  in particular, i was thinking it would be nice to be able to
> > issue commands which automatically subsrcibe, unsubscribe, etc. for
> > different mailing list types (ezmlm, majordomo, etc.)
> 
> Personally, I don't plan. It would be appreciated if someone will
> contribute such codes.

i'd like to work on code for this -- i'm much more comfortable w/ perl
and i'd like to use the resulting code in other contexts...do you think
that there is a place in IM for code of this nature?

thanks for your attention.

-sen

p.s. if someone has some pointers about where i can look to learn about
process-related functions in elisp, i would really appreciate it.  C-h-f
and M-x apropos offer little help in this case (or so i have found).