Premail and transparent email

[raph@netcom.com (Raph Levien)]

It's quite gratifying to see that people are actually using premail
and like it.

I see premail as a prototype for _real_ transparent email encryption.
A lot of people are intimidated by the need to get premail off the ftp
site, unzip/untar it, and set all the configuration variables to get
it running right. This "intimidation factor," of course, only applies
to *x people. Everybody else is completely out of luck.

I think the same problems hold with most of the scripts that are out
there. Every time I've gotten something to play with, I've had to
diddle with pathnames, or the makefile, or whatever.

The real solution, I think, is to get all the needed components for
transparent email encryption into the standard releases of the tools.
I'm currently working on exactly this project.

In rough outline, PGP will run as a "server" process. Mailers would
connect to the server, and pass all incoming and outgoing mail through
it. One advantage is that clients would contain _no_ crypto content,
so there would be no problems with exportability. The server would
contain much of the functionality of premail. I showed an early
prototype at the last cpunks meeting.

Initially, I am doing all the work in *x, just because that's what I
have tools for, but ultimately it should work for Windows and Mac as
well.

My intent is to get large numbers of people to use PGP to encrypt all
of their email, including casual stuff. This won't happen until
encryption and decryption are _totally_ transparent.

--
Raph Levien -- raph@netcom.com