Re: gpg et co

["Maciej Golebiewski" <s30125 lycos com>]

Hi,

On Thu, 12 Jul 2001 13:31:37  
 Pawel Salek wrote:
>
>On 2001-07-12 12:56 Maciej Golebiewski 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 explicitely mentioned Perl, because with
all the modules available for it, it is
highly probable that there is already one
for handling MIME type data. Although I
won't bet my head for it, because I did not
check this out yet. :)

The other reason to mention Perl was its
taint mode.

>2.  having a plugin mechanism/scripting support sounds like a good idea.
>I think bringing up M$ outlook here is not relevant: outlook's problem
>is that it allows execution of received data. There are at least two
>mail clients written in an interpreted language (tkrat is the primary
>example) that allow user defined procedures without exposing the user to
>security risks.

Exactly. The idea was not to execute
contents of received emails, but rather to
have a mechanism to easily add new ways of
manipulate contents of messages without
having to hack on balsa.

The primary way of using the plugins would
be to have the user explicitely select
the one to run on a message. It might be
also possible to expose some "hooks" and
let the user attach a specific plugin to
a given hook. Haven't even mutt got 
something similar?

I can imagine some things to be done
to message content that one would like
to use (sometimes), but which are not common
enough or simply too silly (e.g. translation
into H4X0R 5P34K or Red Neck English etc :)
to be put into balsa.

Maciej



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