PGP to PC mail integration

[Mike Ingle <inglem@adnetsol.com>]

Mail user interface integration remains the biggest barrier to
widespread PGP use. As long as it's inconvenient each time you want to
send a mail message, people won't use it. Existing efforts to fix this
are usually mail-program specific (elm-pgp port, some Pegasus and
Eudora hacks) and/or not terribly convenient (ViaCrypt and similar
win-pgp front ends). It seems to me that people are attacking this
problem from the wrong end of the pipe.

Almost all internet mail programs (Eudora, Pegasus, Netscape, Exchange
client with Internet mail, you name it) talk to a POP server and an
SMTP server. They allow you to specify the hostnames of each.

Instead of messing with user interfaces, you set the POP and SMTP
addresses of your mail program to "localhost". You run locally a Visual
Basic program that sits on ports 110 (POP) and 25 (SMTP) listening for
connections. The VB program is configured with the addresses of your
real SMTP and POP servers, and acts as a proxy.

When your mail program retrieves POP mail, it goes through the VB
program, and the VB program decrypts any PGP mail it sees. When it
sends mail, the VB program encrypts any mail it has a PGP key for the
recipient of.

Once this is set up, the user burden is near zero, and it works with
any winsock-based mail program. What do you think of the idea?

						Mike