Re: gpg et co

[Brian Stafford <brian stafford uklinux net>]

On Thu, 12 July 12:31 Pawel Salek wrote:

> > 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 don't have strong opinions about this. I would like to make just two
> remarks:
> 1. plain passing the data through the plugin is not sufficient, the
> encoded part must have proper MIME type.

I just think using scripted plugins to implement stuff in a fixed format
mandated by standards that allow no latitude for reasons of interoperability
is wrong.

Having plugins to present data is a different matter. (Though I'm still
nervous of plugins in mail UAs).

Bear in mind that encrypted and/or signed MIME is a generic mechanism that
can be applied to *any* MIME encoded document. Furthermore, it can be applied
to entire documents or to individual parts (which could be signed/encrypted
by different entities).

In an MUA its effects lie between user presentation and mail transport.  In
this scenario, after decryption Balsa would just display text/plain or
text/html as usual and the existing mechanism for using external programs
to handle MIME types will operate as before.  Encryption would be transparent
to the user (other than an interface to manage pass phrases and certificates).

Brian