On Sat, Jun 28, 2003 at 04:08:05PM +0100, Millis Miller wrote: > This from Upstream: > A) Email users SMTP or Sendmail. (Main purpose!) Which would make it the only piece of mail-aware software on the system that doesn't depend on a working /usr/sbin/sendmail; so this is great as long as you never install any other software. (c.f. 'apt-cache showpkg mail-transport-agent'.) > B) Email handles the GPG interaction. Meaning you can use email from a > cron job and as long as you have your pass in the email.conf file, you > won't have to type it in when gpg asks for it. You'd have to come up > with a pretty wicked shell script otherwise. This is as good of a reason as any to NOT include this software in Debian. If you want passwordless access to a gpg key, create your gpg key without a passphrase -- don't encourage users to acquire a false sense of security by putting a passphrase on their key, and then storing the passphrase on disk next to the key! > C) Email handles signature files > D) Email handles an address book. > E) Email does binary attachments and uses MIME (mime types, base64 > encoding) to "attach" and send them with the message. You can't do this > by doing what is described above. You can UUEncode it, but A LOT of > mail clients don't support UUEncoding anymore. Plus, you can attach > multiple binary files with email, not just one UUEncoded file. For > instance: > uuencode file.bin | gpg --clearsign | mail .... OTOH, the above features seem useful. > First of all, it's only one file. Second of all, it's using a > --clearsign and not the way email does it. I believe it was you who > suggested email sign/encrypt messages such as Ximian and Outlook does. > This is the way the majority of modern mail reader clients view such > data. So in short: > The command line way you are suggesting violates modern RFC compliant > mail reader clients. However, email follows RFC's 821, 2015 (PGP > Encryption), 2045, and soon 2554. Outlook is not a modern mail reader. It *certainly* doesn't know what to do with PGP/MIME messages. In light of this, I think providing tools that allow users to more easily generate PGP/MIME messages is a good thing. > 3. Change the name from email to something else. > Upstream does not want to do this, as the name has been in use since > 2001, with an established user base. Apparently (for what it is worth) > it has been used in Slackware with this name. I've been using email since 1994, and have never heard of this software. I'm sure many here have other examples of prior art. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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