Review of the EPP plug-in 0.2 for Eudora

[Alan Olsen <alan@ctrl-alt-del.com>]

[Note: this is CCed to the developer for two reasons.  First, I wanted him
to know of the review.  Second, I have another two bugs at the bottom that
I have not reported.]

I have been putting the Eudora PGP plug-in through its paces.  My findings
have been interesting...

The instalation was quick and painless.  All of the defaults were pulled
from the mail information upon first running the Eudora after installing.

It provides some basic functions for using PGP.  

The functions provided are:

-- Clearsign Message
-- Decrypt Message
-- Encrypt Message
-- Verify Signature
-- Add Key
-- Paste (Insert) Key

These appear under the Edit menu in the plug-ins submenu.  (It would be
nice for these to be in their own seperate menu, but that may be beyond the
scope of the plug-in developers kit.)

I have not seen any glaring errors (GPFs and the like.)  There are some
functional problems I have discovered.  These should be cleaned up in a
future version.  (What do you expect for a 0.2 release?)

These are the problems/bugs I have found so far:

--  If you do not define a default ID in the PGP config.txt, it will take
the last ID generated on the secret key ring.  (This is a common problem.
This is not the only app that has it.)

--  The program does not word wrap before sending the message to get
signed.  This breaks the signature when Eudora word wraps it opon sending
the message.  (Another common problem. I remember a bunch of apps fixing
this one at one time a few months ago...)

--  If you decrypt a message, the mail headers are destroyed.  (I just
discovered this one last night.  It makes replying a bit of a challenge...)

-- The plug-in does not deal with "personalities".  (This is not a bug, but
something that would be *REAL* helpful.  Now if you could get personalities
that connected to nym servers.)

All in all, this is a useful plug-in.  It has a few rough spots, but that
is to be expected.  (This is a 0.2 release.)

Having this functionality in Eudora makes PGP encrypted lists *MUCH* more
usable.  (Cut and paste for each message and/or firing up a seperate e-mail
app to scan for messages becomes more trouble than it is worth in a real
hurry...)

BTW, this is the original information as to where to get the plug-in.  How
much of this is current, i am not certain...  (The mailing list was broken
according to Lucky Green.)

>                             Eudora/PGP Plug-In
>
>Download version 0.20 from the Web:
>   * http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~gt6525c/eppi/epp16_02.zip
>     (for 16-bit version of Eudora 3.0 for Windows 3.1)
>   * http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~gt6525c/eppi/epp32_02.zip
>     (for 32-bit version of Eudora 3.0 for Windows NT/95)
>
>If you don't have Web access, but have FTP access, try the following sites.
>Note that if the version you are trying to get was released today or just
a few days ago, it may not have shown up at the sites below yet, so give it
a few days:
>
>papa.indstate.edu: /pub/winsock-l/mail/epp16_02.zip
>                   /pub/winsock-l/Windows95/mail/epp32_02.zip
>                   /pub/winsock-l/WindowsNT/mail/epp32_02.zip
>
>ftp.winsite.com:   /pub/pc/win3/winsock/epp16_02.zip
>                   /pub/pc/win95/winsock/epp32_02.zip
>
>If you want to be automatically notified of new versions, send e-mail to
gt6525c@prism.gatech.edu with the subject of "eppi news", and the following
message body:
>
>join
>stop
>
>

---
|        "Spam is the Devil's toothpaste!" - stuart@teleport.com         |
|"The moral PGP Diffie taught Zimmermann unites all| Disclaimer:         |
| mankind free in one-key-steganography-privacy!"  | Ignore the man      |
|`finger -l alano@teleport.com` for PGP 2.6.2 key  | behind the keyboard.|
|         http://www.ctrl-alt-del.com/~alan/       |alan@ctrl-alt-del.com|