Re: gpg et co

[Brian Stafford <brian stafford uklinux net>]

On Thu, 12 July 14:18 Carlos Morgado wrote:

> not very practical cause gpg/pgp signatures are sent in mime attachments. 
> the plugin would need a way to access the whole message
> 
> honestly, i think this belongs in gnome-mime or VFS, not the mta itself.
> the "neat" design would be to have balsa being a Mailbox or MessageStream
> or whatnot server for Bonobo/VFS and then have a crypto server capable of 
> fetching messages from balsa and oking them or not. also you could say 
> take this message and give me a back a application/gpg-encripted mime attach
> or a gpg-signature. having that in place, the crypto server and mail server
> choices would be left to the user.
> bloat ? why of course! but this is Gnome ;)

I would argue that since MIME is a mechanism for representing complex
hierarchical documents, all MIME functionality in a program should be
handled by a library specifically designed for that purpose. (Gmime
comes to mind.)  Encrpytion and signing support should be an integral part
of that mechanism, i.e. from within, not bolted on to the outside of it.

Of course within such a library it could hook into the crypto server
via Corba, Bonobo or whatever (it might even expose its own interface by
such means) - or it could just link with OpenSSL or something in the
traditional way.

Brian