The Cypherpunks Mail Project

[Eric Hughes <hughes@soda.berkeley.edu>]

I wrote:
>[...] there is no one place to push on the mail system to add encryption.

Let me explain.  You can push on a standard, but that doesn't change
any code.  If everybody in the world read mail with /bin/mail, then
you could rewrite that and add encryption.  What certainly is the case,
though, is that there are a lot of mail readers out there.

It is also the case that the cypherpunks, of all people, should be
using encrypted mailers.  Otherwise we are hypocrites.

Fen advocates MIME, and Ittai concurs.

Ittai asks, relating to existing MIME development work:
>Do we really want to give them an additional burden -- or do we want
>to leverage off work that is already being done?

It was my vision of this development that people here on the list
would do the work of integration and publish the results.

It is also my suspicion that simple PGP decryption support is fairly
straightforward, being mostly the ability to run a command on a block
and replace the block with the output of the pipe.  This model works
with regular mail and MIME, since it runs at the very top level of the
application.

Eric