Premail and transparent email

It's quite gratifying to see that people are actually using premail
and like it.

I see premail as a prototype for _real_ transparent email encryption.
A lot of people are intimidated by the need to get premail off the ftp
site, unzip/untar it, and set all the configuration variables to get
it running right. This "intimidation factor," of course, only applies
to *x people. Everybody else is completely out of luck.

I think the same problems hold with most of the scripts that are out
there. Every time I've gotten something to play with, I've had to
diddle with pathnames, or the makefile, or whatever.

The real solution, I think, is to get all the needed components for
transparent email encryption into the standard releases of the tools.
I'm currently working on exactly this project.

In rough outline, PGP will run as a "server" process. Mailers would
connect to the server, and pass all incoming and outgoing mail through
it. One advantage is that clients would contain _no_ crypto content,
so there would be no problems with exportability. The server would
contain much of the functionality of premail. I showed an early
prototype at the last cpunks meeting.

Initially, I am doing all the work in *x, just because that's what I
have tools for, but ultimately it should work for Windows and Mac as
well.

My intent is to get large numbers of people to use PGP to encrypt all
of their email, including casual stuff. This won't happen until
encryption and decryption are _totally_ transparent.

--
Raph Levien -- raph@netcom.com

Raph Levien writes
> My intent is to get large numbers of people to use PGP to encrypt all
> of their email, including casual stuff. This won't happen until
> encryption and decryption are _totally_ transparent.


This is the way to get people to use crypto.

It would also be useful to patch majordomo to check signature
consistency -- to check that a message signed by X is signed
with the same public key as previous messages by X (a non
trivial problem because of the key distribution issue).

In the absence of such tools, nagging people to use crypto
is unlikely to do much to further the cause.


-- 
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We have the right to defend ourselves and our
property, because of the kind of animals that we        James A. Donald
are.  True law derives from this right, not from
the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.            jamesd@acm.org