Re: gpg et co

[Brian Stafford <brian stafford uklinux net>]

On Thu, 12 July 11:56 Maciej Golebiewski wrote:
> Hi,
>  
> On Thu, 12 Jul 2001 11:00:38  
>  christophe barb? wrote:
> >I've not yet start coding it but I can't see where libmutt could be
> >helpfull or not here ? In my mind it's a feature that could be integrated
> >in the gui code.
> 
> What about adding to balsa support for
> plugins written in Perl and then
> implementing PGP/GPG (or strong
> encryption like rot13 ;) ) etc. support
> in plugins?

I think the major worry here would be one of interoperability.

MIME pretty much allows for any type of document to be transported by email.
However, unless a document is considered an attachment, the actual formats
those documents take is very strictly limited, e.g. text/plain is about the
only widely acceptable format for a message.

PGP/MIME and S/MIME are different signing and encryption methods layered
over two standard MIME types, multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted.
The standards involved do not allow much latitude in these formats so the
value of creating them through PERL plugins is questionable.  You'd only
run into interoperability problems.  Better to hard-code the requirements
of the standards into the code.

Secondly, I would not want to run any MUA that had the capability of running
arbitrary scripts under the control of an external interpreter, even one
that runs in a sandbox.  That path leads to the mess M$ Outlook is in
with VB script worms and viruses.

Brian Stafford