Announce: usmt

[Mike Schiraldi <raldi research netsol com>]

Greetings.

I was working on getting S/MIME support into another MUA, and realized
that an application was sorely needed that provided a key management
database indexed by email address.

So i've put together a program called usmt, or Universal Secure Mail
Tools. Not only is it such a database, it also provides a simple and
universal interface for S/MIME backends like OpenSSL. Also, it can be
extended to support any other crypto system, like PGP.

A MUA can say to it, "This is the public key for foo@bar.com. And this is
my private key" and then later come back and say, "Sign this message, and
then encrypt it so that only foo@bar.com can see it."

The protocol by which it communicates with MUAs is a subset of RFC 822.
The program was designed so that usmt support, and thereby any crypto
system, could be added to a MUA with as little new code as possible.

It's open source, of course. LGPLed. (Why not just GPLed? Well, even
though, as a Perl script, it can't really be linked in the traditional
sense to any MUA that i'm aware of, our legal department figured we might
as well explicitly say it's okay to use its services with a closed-source
MUA. Makes sense to me.)

I'm going to start integrating it into mutt and possibly Pine, but would
welcome any efforts to get Balsa to speak to it. It should be an easy task
for someone familiar with the Balsa code, but if i'm wrong, let me know if
i can make it easier by changing the protocol or whatever.

The latest release is available at
http://download.sourceforge.net/janitor/usmt-0.4.1.tar.gz

You'll need to install some Perl modules, too:

http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/C/CJ/CJM/Tie-CPHash-1.001.tar.gz
http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/G/GA/GAAS/Digest-MD5-2.12.tar.gz
http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/G/GA/GAAS/MIME-Base64-2.12.tar.gz

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