Re: Transparent Email

[Alex Strasheim <alex@omaha.com>]

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> They are already there - in elm and pine, as well as many others.

Yes, I know this.  I have hacked up a couple of primitive scripts I use 
to sign my outgoing mail from elm, for example.

There is, I think, a big advantage to using premail as a
/usr/lib/sendmail, though, namely that it provides a general solution.  In
one fell swoop, I get elm, pine, /bin/mail, etc.  Email sent from trn or
tin is encrypted, (but posts are still unsigned, unfortunately.)

The thing that I'm shooting for is a unix workstation which works and 
acts pretty much exactly like most other workstations, at least as far as 
email goes, except that there's a file (in this case ~/.premailrc) with a 
list of people with whom encrypted and signed email ought to be 
exchanged, transparently.  As far as I'm concerned, as a user, I won't 
even be able to tell the difference between corresponding with people on 
the list and off the list.  It will look pretty much the same to me.

It's not a revolutionary improvement by any means, but I think it is an
evolutionary step forward.  And because it is pretty much a matter of 
kludging together a bunch of available pieces, it might be a good prelude 
to pop clients which would be more useful to the public at large, but a 
lot harder to implement.

> > This leaves the problem of passphrases for outgoing signatures and
> > automatically decrypting incoming mail, but I think that cfs will let me
> > kludge something together which will get around this.  
> 
> No need to kludge anything.  Take a good look at the PGP docs - they will
> let you do exactly what you want.

I know, but I'm a little squeamish about leaving my keys unprotected.  
Also, I'm not very fond of the idea that encrypted email would be 
decrypted when it got here and left in plaintext on the mail spool.
 
> > (My situation is a little unusual, because I'm running linux on a pc which
> > is connected to the net via a static slip account.  I don't think this
> > would work well in other situations.)
> 
> I'm running Linux here, and have run it both as static/dynamic SLIP, and hung
> (well!) off a T1 line.

The main problem comes from using cfs vs. having mail come in all the
time.  A constant flow of mail necessitates having cfs dirs mounted all
the time, which sort of defeats the point of using cfs in the first 
place.  Of course a queue would fix this, and might tidy up some other 
loose ends about multiple email addresses as well.

> > o	would be reasonably secure when it was powered off
> 
> This last one is really the only advantage to running cfs, IMO.

I agree with you about it being the only advantage, but I think it's a big
enough one to justfify bringing cfs into the picture.  Otherwise it
wouldn't be practical to use this setup in an office or school
environment, because anyone could boot your machine with a floppy and
steal your key. 

> Here's the set of scripts I use here.  Others use more sophisticated ones, but
> I'm not into shell programming ;}

Thanks...  yours is a lot more sophisticated than mine, though:

	#!/bin/sh
	/usr/bin/vi $@
	clear
	echo -n "Sign file? (y/N)"
	read ans
	case $ans in
		y)	pgp  -fast < $1 > $1.asc; mv $1.asc $1;;
		Y)	pgp  -fast < $1 > $1.asc; mv $1.asc $1;;
	esac

==
Alex Strasheim | finger astrashe@nyx.cs.du.edu
alex@omaha.com | for my PGP 2.6.1. public key

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