Re: pgp support?

["Peter A. Kimball" <pkimball hamilton edu>]

Ian Campbell wrote:

> I have heard rumours (on Evolution list I think) that the gnupg people are
> working on making the backend of gpg into a library.
>
> If this is true, I would think waiting untill this becomes available might be
> advisable, it will certainly make life easier...

It certainly would have for me:  There was, for a while, a library made by one of
the GPG developers which was supposed to do all of the hard work, Privacy Guard
Glue (PGG), and I did look into using it, but development seems to have stopped
on it, and I was unable to get it to work.  I tried contacting the developer, but
got no response.

I will say that the way I had to do the GPG interactions is highly insecure.
Because I had to use pipes to get data to and from GPG, there are security issues
which would be resolved by using a library.  Now, should this level of security
be an issue for the general user: probably not.  But, for the really paranoid,
yes.

I don't know if anyone has looked at what I've written, I hope I didn't make it
sound too poor.  It does work, but I'm sure if you're willing to wait, using the
library is a better deal.

Peter

>
> On Wed, 16 Aug 2000 19:32:04 Peter A. Kimball wrote:
> > Hi all:
> >
> > There does exist a version of Balsa with gpg support.  It was a project
> > of mine for the summer which has not proven as easy as I had hoped.  I
> > have not finished some of the GUI, but the basic encryption/signatures
> > work, and it can decrypt messages, albeit through a very odd interface.
> > I'll include the link to my tarfile of the working version.  I was
> > unable to figure out how to get patch to work correctly, and have not
> > had the time to work against the new balsa version.  (The version that
> > this is based upon is 0.8.0).  I'm sorry if people were expecting more,
> > and I plan to do more, but with ten weeks to work in, and only one
> > semester of C/C++, this turned out to be a hard project.  I would
> > suggest looking at the source before trying to patch it against any
> > current Balsa. I've probably made a whole bunch of idiotic newbie
> > programmer-wannabe mistakes, etc, but as far as I can tell, it does
> > work.
> >
> > You must have GPG installed with your key already set up.  Then launch
> > this Balsa, and in the send-message window, there's a new button, called
> > security settings (or something, I'm not on my development machine at
> > the moment).  Click that, select encrypt or sign, enter the information
> > and click ok.  Now write yer message and hit send.  Decryption is
> > tougher. Go back to the send-message window, click the security button,
> > click sign, enter your password.  Now click OK, and close that window.
> > Now, double click on the message you wish to decrypt, and from the
> > rightmost pull-down menu, select decrypt.  Bingo.  It does not check
> > signatures yet: GPG does not seem to output the signature verification
> > stuff to the out or error. weird.
> >
> > Once again, this is a poor showing, and I apologize.  I do plan on fixes
> > etc in the near future, though I am very busy for the next few weeks.
> >
> > here is the file, I hope it works.  It's an entire version of balsa,
> > 0.8.0, with gpg support.  I don't know how else to make this available.
> > sorry.
> >
> > http://students.hamilton.edu/2003/pkimball/balsa_gpg.tar.gz
> >
> >
> > Peter Kimball
> > pkimball@hamilton.edu
> >
> >
> >
> > "m.nine.six" wrote:
> >
> > > hi,
> > >
> > > is there any pgp (or gnupg) support? stable or unstable?
> > >
> > > have a nice day,
> > > alias m.nine.six.
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
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> > > balsa-list@gnome.org
> > > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/balsa-list
> >
> >
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