Subject: Software infrastructure
...other good stuff deleted...I read mail at 2400B.
The result would be that when you receive an encrypted message, you just list it out to your terminal and then, automatically, PGP fires up and asks you for your pass phrase (unless you SET it ahead of time in the PC's environment). It then displays the message for you.
This simple model has several deficiencies. When I log into a Unix system, or Compuserve, or Portal's "Online" service, and read my mail, it is often shown to me a page at a time. This is so that I can read long messages more easily. Then after each message I can delete it, save it, reply to it, etc. If I do reply or if I want to create a new message it will drop me into a text editor to compose the message.
The result is that the mail program you are running on the host computer may do some munging on the PGP message, like inserting "Press RETURN for next page" or perhaps some terminal control characters. These would have to be filtered out before PGP could run on the file, or you would have to be able to suppress them when you read this message.
If we are talking about an off-line reader, this is solved by a trivial filter routine. If you want to do this on-line, well it might take time.
Also, assuming we could capture the message and run PGP on it automatically, the resulting decrypted message will have to be saved and given a file name. Then if the user wants to reply to it he is going to have to leave his terminal and run an editor. (At least, that's what I have to do now.)
Why save the plaintext? I keep it in cyphertext and decrypt it on demand. And when I want to reply, then I decrypt it, quote it and have the user edit that file, which will presumably be re-encrypted.
Plus, this only deals with the message-receiving problem, not the sending problem.
Actually, these are the same problems in different clothes.
I'm not sure what the solution is. Maybe the PC program needs to be more than a terminal program, and become more of a whole mail-processing program. Maybe you should just download your mail file en masse from the host to your PC, pre-process it to replace (in place) the incoming encrypted messages with plaintext versions (annotated to show validated signatures), then run a PC program which will display one message at a time, let you reply, save, etc. This way the decryptions are done before you even look at the mail file and incoming encrypted mail is treated on a first class basis (the same as other mail).
Then for outgoing mail you'd like to be able to drop into a user-defined editor which is run with a command line causing his file to be saved to some temp file name. Then we can automatically encrypt the outgoing mail for him based on the destination, add a remailer chain if requested, etc. Then he gives a command and all his replies and new mail are uploaded and sent.
These last 2 paragraphs describe almost exactly what my scripts do!
This would be pretty tough to do since there are so many different ways of sending and receiving mail on host computers. This would again have to be a customizable part of the program, where we could provide modules to deal with the common cases of Unix running "mail", elm, mh, etc., and perhaps some of the commercial services. BBS's would ideally be handled as well. Hackers could contribute scripts for supporting their favorite mail system.
I find that I need to be a bit more modular with my scripts so that I can call a different module depending on which type of system I'm on...Working on it at this moment. +-----------------------+-----------------------------+---------+ | J. Michael Diehl ;-) | I thought I was wrong once. | PGP KEY | | mdiehl@triton.unm.edu | But, I was mistaken. |available| | mike.diehl@fido.org | | Ask Me! | | (505) 299-2282 +-----------------------------+---------+ | | +------"I'm just looking for the opportunity to be -------------+ | Politically Incorrect!" <Me> | +-----If codes are outlawed, only criminals wil have codes.-----+ +----Is Big Brother in your phone? If you don't know, ask me---+