Re: howto digitially sign emails programmatically with pgp?

From: Nagy Daniel (nagydani_at_cs.bme.hu)
Date: 03/18/04 

Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2004 22:57:30 +0100

On Mon, 15 Mar 2004, Philipp Ott wrote:

> > As I understand, you want to sign emails. There are many digital signature
> > standards, which one do you want to follow?
>
> Well, any that the majority of ppl can use: current versions of Outlook,
> Outlook Express, Mozilla, Netscape.

In that case, you're tied to S/MIME signatures, as I am not aware of
PGP plugins for Outlook & Co. S/MIME is handled by "openssl" in a
scriptable fashion. You can generate S/MIME signed messages automagically.

Even though I have to admit that I strongly dislike S/MIME and all the
PKI/X509 business. I think it's a scam to extort money for certification
and has a lot of very real shortcomings when compared to OpenPGP and
PGP/MIME. For Mozilla and Netscape there is a plug-in called "enigmail"
which handles PGP/MIME. I have a sript that generates PGP/MIME signed
messages, if you need that. But, again, it might not work for Outlook and
Outlook Express.

> > S/MIME, PGP/MIME or PGP cleartext signature?
> > In what form are your emails available? Plain text, MIME payload or
> > RFC-822 complete with headers?
>
> Well the emails dont need to be encrypted or so, what we just want to
> ensure with the digital signature is that the contents are from us and
> not tampered with. To your question I would replay that the to-be-signed
> content of the email is available as a list of 7bit mime-parts, the
> message contents and the encoded PDF attachments.

It doesn't answer my question. But if you want it to work out-of-the box
for the most popular email clients, go for S/MIME as much as I hate it. 

-- 
Daniel

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