EmacsWiki: Mail Crypt (original) (raw)

From the Mailcrypt manual:

Mailcrypt is an Emacs Lisp package which provides a simple but powerful interface to cryptographic functions for mail and news. With Mailcrypt, encryption becomes a seamlessly integrated part of your mail and news handling environment.

Mailcrypt works with PGP and GnuPG. It interfaces with most email clients for Emacs. Note that its method of encrypting and signing emails may not always be the same as the more common method of MIME attachments (used by MUA’s such as Mutt), but each can usually read the other with some massaging. Oort Gnus (the CVS bleeding-edge version, currently hovering around 5.9) contains support for GnuPG (including MIME) directly, but it can also use Mailcrypt.

Get mailcrypt from http://mailcrypt.sourceforge.net

See also: BbdbAndMailCrypt.

Anybody who understands the issues involved with inline ASCII-armored PGP versus MIME attachments, please update the above explanation; I cannot guarantee that I got it quite right, although I think that is enough to answer the first newbie questions as to why somebody else’s signed or encrypted email to them didn’t work seamlessly. – CharlesSebold

If anybody is using Gnus and MailCrypt with languages other than ASCII: there is a problem. If you encrypt a message and send it, Gnus will look at its contents and decide which charset to specify in the message header. Since the embedded ASCII-armored content is always pure and naked ASCII, it will choose a charset of “us-ascii” – which certainly will annoy the reader at the other end if the decrypted message contains characters not covered by ASCII.

A solution would be to hook some code into mc-pre-encryption-hook that looks at the message, chooses an appropriate charset and specifies it in the message header. For completeness the same thing the other way round would be nice also: Hook something into mc-post-decryption-hook that decides which charset the message actually uses, adds the appropriate fields to the header and makes Gnus redisplay the message.

Based on MailCrypt there is http://www.emacswiki.org/elisp/mc-gpg-file-mode.el which allows automatic decryption / encryption of files ending with ‘.gpg’ at file open / save. This can e.g. be used to comfortably handle a gpg encrypted file with passwords or such ‘secrets’.

Tip for Emacs-only users: In the file mailcrypt.el, there are unconditional autoloads for “itimer”, part of XEmacs. These are problematic for code running under Emacs that checks (fboundp ‘start-timer), such as vhdl-mode.el, for example. I’m not sure what the optimum resolution should be (arguably, vhdl-mode.el and ilk should check in some other way), but found that an effective workaround is to comment out the autoloads in mailcrypt.el entirely. --ttn

CategoryModes CategoryMailAddons CategoryGnus CategoryCryptography