-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Jonathan Rochkind replied:

At 3:58 AM 11/29/94 Lucky Green wrote:

...

I do not mean to belittle the work that has been done but unless the encryption is built into the mailer and using a remailer means clicking the "use X remailer(s)" button and the mailer better know which ones are working and do the PGP envelopes it won't happen.

Have you used premail? It pretty much does all of that. People still aren't using premail either because they can't figure out how to install it (doubtful it's not hard to install) or because they don't have a need for it that's great enough to justify the (minimal) time neccesary to ftp it and install it or wait the (sometimes more painful) time neccesary for the computer to encrypt and/or sign your outgoing messages.

This brings up a point that I - among others - have to flog every now and then: the *x-centric nature of most of the net. I have no doubt that premail works wonders - but I don't know of any version of it that would run on my MS-DOS box a Mac an Amiga etc. I use PC Eudora for email and have pinged on QualComm every so often to ask when the commercial version will allow/support external encryption programs. As some may have noticed over the weekend I also started trying to use the PGP Tools package to try and write a PGP.DLL. For various reasons (mostly me :-) it's going to be more difficult and take longer than I thought - but I am *not* going to give up on it. Until/unless there exists fairly easy-to-implement means of including crypto for applications programmers on a variety of platforms other than *x boxes progress in the click-a-button-to-encrypt area is going to be bloody slow.

Because premail makes it incredibly easy to use PGP on a unix box. And

that matter

on a mac. And there are some people working on an applescript that will automate using remailers on a mac too. But ease of use appearantly isn't enough; no matter how easy it gets to use it's still going to have some cost to the user over not using it. Even if the cost is only having to wait the 1.5 seconds it takes your machine to decrypt/encrypt a message. Unless there's a use for it

for the Eudora/PGP applescritps make it incredibly easy to use PGP people won't be willing to spend that 1.5 seconds per

message.

This kinda supports my previous observations: the necessity of adding external scripts and such to the Mac version of Eudora slows down the program's operation more than necessary. If there were a Mac resource (of whatever kind - I'm not Mac-fluent) that the nice folks over at QualComm could use to build crypto into the program to start with then they wouldn't have the excuse of "we can't because there's nothing to do it with at the source level". My ha-penny's worth.... Dave Merriman -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBLtuEeMVrTvyYOzAZAQFwuwQAtGMZyS3vj1T88EgaLuKOqWARruGjWTxv V2+Lri/nPuBwm6Nkfu12MBHGXl9QlMsh58MuhvFfvA2qdgmuDBy0iHBaPq0C1L5v 1YnHiBHrYIfLkNchqapuMQSM6tbL+PJWGWikqYV2Nv7SR6Mtu+jCK8yt6biHZxIm qU9Yk4CJ0Kw= =+K/s -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Finger merriman@feenix.metronet.com for PGP public key and fingerprint. PGP encrypted Email welcome, encouraged, and preferred. "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." John F. Kennedy