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From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton)
Newsgroups: net.news.adm,net.mail
Subject: Re: reading of other people's mail
Message-ID: <2257@cbosgd.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 28-Jun-86 21:56:21 EDT
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.2257
Posted: Sat Jun 28 21:56:21 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 30-Jun-86 04:47:18 EDT
References: <62@houligan.UUCP> <380@nitrex.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus, Oh
Lines: 28
Xref: watmath net.news.adm:810 net.mail:1716

In article <380@nitrex.UUCP> rob@nitrex.UUCP (rob robertson) writes:
>In article <62@houligan.UUCP> dave@smaug.UUCP (Dave Cornutt) writes:
>If your on a unix system sending to a unix system, try mark horton's
>uuencode/uudecode, along with crypt.  Takes a little longer, and is
>a bit of a hastle, but it works.

Thanks for the plug, Rob, although of course uuencode/uudecode are
in the public domain, so it's not like it personally matters to me.

I'd like to mention that RFC 822 has a hook in it specifically for
this.  If you put a header "Encrypted: foo, bar" in there, this
tells the receiving user interface that the mail was encrypted with
method "foo", and it should go invoke the method "foo" decrypter.
"bar" is a hint telling it which key to use for decryption (although
not the key itself, more like an index into a table of keys that has
been agreed upon in advance.)

At the time, I was hoping people would write some enhancements to
popular EMail user interfaces (e.g. Mail/mailx, MH, etc) that would
support this.  So far I haven't seen any.  But given the UNIX crypt,
compress, and uuencode/uudecode, it shouldn't be hard to write one.
(A bit more work and it could be made into a subroutine, possibly
without compressing, so it would be fast.)

If somebody out there would implement this, perhaps we could render
this whole subject moot.

	Mark