Re: Winsock & PGP Integration

[Adam Shostack <adam@bwh.harvard.edu>]

	Seems to me that the UNIX model of building one mail transport
instead of 20 is a good one.  If you seperate out the UA from the
transport, you make it easy to fix or update the transport.

	So I would suggest, rather than hacking at Winsock and
hoping to catch the right protocols, build a set of libraries that can
be called by programs.  smtp.dll, for example, would be a mailer that
any mail program could call.  nntp.dll would handle news, underneath
all the various interfaces.  If you want to pretend to be premail, you
do it in smtp.dll.

	The advantage to other programmers is that they no longer have
to do the low level stuff that they had to before.  It allows
programmers build whats interesting, namely, the interface & gizmos.

	Make the package do the user interface side of things, and
make a seperate package to do the network protocols.  Makes building,
testing, and changing things a lot easier.  And while you're at it,
store all of your files as text.  :)

adam


Johnathan Corgan wrote:

| On a Un*x machine, premail works by impersonating the mail
| transfer agent and intercepting the flow of mail in each
| direction, adding encryption, signing, and anonymous remail
| services in a rather elegant fashion.  As the mail system under
| Un*x (indeed, the entire OS) is designed to be a "piped and glued
| together" batch of smaller utilities, premail's method works well
| and is very 'unix-like'.
| 
| How to achieve the same under Windows with winsock based SLIP or
| PPP access?  The various mail agents such as Eudora and Chameleon
| are integrated packages that do everything from using SMTP and POP
| for mail transfer to providing the user agent that reads and
| writes mail. There really is no simple way to wedge into the
| package and replace or supplement functionality.
| 
| Except one.  What all of these agents have in common is that they
| interface with the Windows Sockets API to establish TCP streams
| that are used in the POP and SMTP protocols.  Since these are well
| known and standardized protocols, this gives us our toehold.


 

-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
						       -Hume